I don’t know whose idea it was to take my father out for the day, but it was me who suggested the cinema. My brother Dara and I were back in Derry for the weekend to celebrate our dad’s 76th birthday, and such visits typically involve us staying out in his house in the sticks, where he lives with my sister Caoimhe and her husband Eddie (his favourite son), and making occasional trips for provisions to the city. We spend the rest of our time harassing him to talk about the olden days (which he doesn’t much care to do), to distract him from giving us jobs to do around the house (which he very much does).
In this way it is a regression to childhood, which was apt as we had both travelled without kids. Even five years in, acting like a parent around him gives me impostor syndrome. There’s something about juggling babies or scolding children, and then being marched up to the attic to find a very important piece of wood, which my dad needs right this minute, that makes me feel like a small boy playing at being a dad, as if I’ve burst into the living room, wearing his work shoes and a drawn-on beard saying, ‘Look at me, I’m an adult, ha ha ha!’
