Your role as a child

Tomorrow, I am going to bring The Midgets to hang out with a group of octogenarian ex-merchant seamen. This is something I've done for a few years. We sit about and talk shite. They tell me some pretty bizarre things that I'm hoping they won't tell me tomorrow now that Midget 1 understands what's going on around him.

I can understand that it sounds a bit odd. I do this little trip for a reason.

A few years back, my best friend died. He also happened to be my favourite Uncle.

The first time I got drunk, it was with him. I went to stay with him and my Auntie when I was on the long summer school holidays. I had just turned 13. They had purchased me a stinking great bottle of gin. It would have been rude not to get through it all.

This, as I say, was the first time I got drunk with him, but not the last. Over the years, he expanded my drinking palette, and we began to experiment with the weirdest alcoholic beverages you could think of. I believe that we once almost drank meths. We would always, however, start with a few Guinness for the goiter, or to line the stomach.

I can't tell you the number of times I have sat drunkenly propped up in one of his front room chairs, very short of pissing myself with laughter. Constantly.

The things he told me, some that possibly he shouldn't. The time he told me about the donkey sex show (I met the guy that went with him at his funeral). When he told me about how my Auntie had insisted he use Viagra. Telling me about when he was a kid with his sister and their dog, Rob. Some of the things that happened to him during the war, that he'd told nobody about previously. Some of them horrific, the death of his friends during the war, others hilarious, like the chef who went crazy on board a submarine with him, then ran around with his knob out carrying a machete. As my Uncle said "he had an hampton as big as your arm". A pleasant image, you must concede.

When I found myself approaching homelessness a few years back when I was pregnant with Midget 1, I got two offers of a place for myself, The Cat, and the baby to stay. He was one of them. He was the only member of my family to do so.

I couldn't have loved somebody that I didn't give birth to more. I say that with no flippancy. I worshiped the man, and he was to all intent and purposes my Dad from my late childhood until the day he died.

A fantastic man who was much loved and maintained a sense of humour so evil and astute that he kept it literally to the last breath he took before his unfortunately very painful and long drawn out passing. You could always be yourself with no fear of judgement. You could argue and be friends at the end of it. I still look to him for guidance and I miss his counsel.

I found out a few months ago that my father had died. It happened maybe a year or two before. I have no idea how, at what point in time, or from what. When I was told, I didn't feel anything. I felt some sadness for the people that had loved him, but as that didn't include me I felt nothing. I am now half an orphan officially. I felt that more keenly when my Uncle died.

Sometimes, the people who are related to us don't make that much of an impact. As a child, your role is to forgive your parents if they aren't good at it because a lot of parents aren't. Parenting isn't something that you can train for - you're better off training to be an astronaut. You'd be more successful.

As a parent, you keep the kids alive until they can look after themselves. As a child, your job is to forgive your parents if they're not very good at it. The fact that you're a grown up indicates that they've done fairly well. It's now just a case of letting go and forgiving them the bits that they screwed up on.