Sunday 22 September 2013

Andy, my son on the occasion of his birthday


I don’t know whether you’ve ever stopped to think about it, but we enter the world in a totally undemocratic manner. Nobody gives us the right to vote for who our parents are to be. Thus,  and I want to emphasize this,  through no fault of his own, Andy was landed with me as his Dad.
Having said that, let me make one thing perfectly clear: on the whole, by and large, and to his very great credit, he has borne it remarkably bravely.
I say ‘on the whole’, ‘by and large’ because after all, like the rest of us he is only human and there was the odd occasion in his earlier years when he was tempted to take matters into his own hands. Or feet.
But I ask you to take into account that like so many children these days, Andy had to contend with two languages: English, spoken at home, and Swedish, spoken at school and by almost everyone else he came into contact with. However, he did have one or two school lessons a week with a native speaker of English. Such ‘home language tuition’ as it was called, was for children with at least one parent who spoke a tongue other than Swedish, and included something about the history and culture of the land where such parents came from.
I well remember Andy coming home one day and telling me about a lesson he’d had with his home-language teacher, a pleasant, mild-mannered young British lady, in which he had learnt about the Tower of London. As you know, the Tower was where many a prisoner was thrown in days gone by, probably to be tortured before being sent to a very sticky end. I had forgotten all about this when early the following Sunday morning while still in bed, eyes closed and barely conscious, a large, heavy, irregularly shaped object crashed down on me from what I would say must have been a considerable height. It was Andy. Sitting astride my chest he then made a very serious announcement: “You are going to be executed!” he said.
Well, as you can tell, I survived,  largely intact,  minus only a substantial part of one of my front teeth. It could have been worse. Much worse. But don’t think for a moment that, at least in retrospect, I attached any blame to my beloved young offspring. On the contrary, I saw quite clearly what was to become increasingly evident as he grew older, that he was quick and eager to learn — those things that interested him, that is. And what is more, to apply the knowledge he had acquired. It didn’t remain pure theory.
Nevertheless, I did have a quiet word with the pleasant, mild-mannered, young British lady and asked her if it might just be possible — perhaps — for her to find aspects of British history and culture that didn’t put the lives of innocent people at risk. Difficult though it might be.
This ability of Andy’s to be quick to learn, reached a peak when computers entered our lives. But it is here that he revealed another most commendable quality, tolerance, because it was immediately and glaringly evident that his Dad belonged to the school of computer-users who sweated over manuals and still got everything frustratingly wrong. He, of course, ignored the manuals and worked wonders. Oh I am aware of his conviction that I must have been the one who inspired that revised version of the well-known computer processor manufacturer’s logo to read: ‘Intel inside — idiot outside’. It was doubtless a great embarrassment to him, but he just grinned and bore it. Well, he bore it at any rate.
I can also tell you that the cause of his embarrassment didn’t disappear with time. Who else has a Dad who could obliterate his auto.exec.bat file, without which the computer behaved like a chicken that has lost its head, not knowing which way to turn, haphazardly jumbling letters and symbols and disobeying every command? I achieved that considerable feat without even trying. Naturally, I couldn’t hear his groans or sighs, or see the expression on his face when he read the SOS I faxed to him, as by then he was six thousand miles away, a paid professional in Silicon Valley.
But did he publicly disown me? Did he privately tell me to adopt a child somewhere else and get off his back? Not at all. He may have gritted his teeth, he may have asked himself what terrible sins he had committed to deserve such a terrible fate, I can’t be sure, but for half-an-hour he instructed me on the phone how to reconstruct the file, pressing this key and that, giving for me entirely unexpected results, until all was as it should be once more. It must have been like playing chess without seeing the board.
And so it has continued. An innocent victim in at any rate the paternal part of the parental stakes, he has shown courage and forbearance above and beyond the call of duty. So I had not the slightest doubt he would come riding to the rescue once more when a virus wormed its wicked way into my computer and infected hundreds of files. He didn’t know about it straight away because of the nine-hour time difference, but found out first thing the next morning. Not perhaps the best way to start the day, but I had every confidence in him.
All suggestions that he deliberately planted the infection to put me out of action, I treat with the contempt they deserve. No, he is a knight in shining armour, so if perchance you have a glass handy and there happens to be something in it, I ask you to raise it and join with me in drinking a toast to Andy, my son.
Skål!