Gomitech

Reasons why my Dad is too awesome (& its one year on since the stroke)

A year ago today, our Dad Christopher Noel Roche had a Stroke again. A bunch. And everything changed. Across my family’s lives this event continues to echo. And at times, [especially for Mum] this event ripples and rips.

Dad’s currently lying in a bed in the Fairlie House home in Norwood, London (for any friends who’d like to visit). Over the last year Dad has had fantastic care from the NHS. The best opportunities. From his time at Kings Intensive Care Unit. To his stay at Lewisham Hospital (mum’s hospital) while we waited for his chance at Putney’s Neurological Hospital, the RHN.

Then he got his Putney chance in January. All those tests, and hopes. Dad has had everything thrown at him over the last year. Maybe too much, but that’s the Luxury of Hindsight. We fought for Dad as he would us. And then the times when Dad should have plain died. That bloody fighting spirit or inability of his body to not stop going. Not give in.

Dad taught me the importance of each man’s liberty nor giving it up. This is an awesome truth.

This wasn’t taught in a theoretical, academic, review of history type way. Nor in the way his friend Miles Fitzgerald (an Irishman) who helped bring trade unions to the London building industry. A great man in his own way. Dad told stories. His stories. Stories about the Irish struggle. And I grew up with this sense of liberty and its importance. Though not really knowing why. Like I grew up with religion, but didn’t understand faith.

Recently I’ve started a job on a Syrian News website. Collecting news on social media [Facebook, Twitter], the verification of it, giving context to all the activist stories in Syria and creating a platform for it. Seeing the terrible events, this struggle that I’m seeing [fleetingly]. I’m reminded of how precious is our liberty, but we will always fight for it.

Dad’s liberty has been taken from him. Now I know this is when the true fight begins. For the last year I’ve been watching him fighting for his liberty. Though I now know the outcome. I know the ending. He’s not coming back. He will lose. But he will always fight, down to his fibre and cell. Its his way.

I never knew I would learn this lesson the hard way. Watching him dealing with strokes again. I’ve not enjoyed this life’s lesson.

But maybe my Dad is too awesome. It’s one year today.

5:28 pm • 5 October 2012 • 3 notes • View comments

My dog’s a hard drive

Been thinking about writing a short story about a hard drive that collects my memories. Its also my dog. To access the memories, I ask my dog. Unfortunately, my dog is infatuated with me. I start to notice she seems to dominate my memories and begins to play an increasingly central role in my life. But I can’t remember, so it might be true.

Anyhow, just came across this book, seems a pertinent read Guilty Robots Happy Dogs. Looks v interesting.

Will get round to writing it one day…or not :)

11:29 am • 26 September 2012 • 1 note • View comments

Reasons why My Dad is Awesome: Dad’s got style

If you knew my Dad, everyone would agree that Dad was a snappy dresser. I guess he was lucky in some way as he was in his 20s and 30s across the 1950s & 60s, an architect in London. But even then he stood out. One of Dad’s partners, Ray, recently told me how Dad was the first of them to wear a pink shirt back in the day. Took me till I was in my 30s to wear a pink shirt. There’s something very defining the first time you don a pink, smart shirt as a man [definitely recommend it by the by].

Look at those desert boots! [And ladies, what about mum…]

Tomorrow, the 10th December, is Dad’s birthday. He was moved last week from King’s College hospital to Lewisham hospital. He still has the tracheotomy in his throat and overall there is very limited improvement to Dad. He is tracking us sometimes with his eyes, definitely been aware of us at times. He’s smiled at us and I still hold onto the time he smiled so clearly to Rach when she sang to him. The great news in recent days has been he’s accepted to Putney and will be going there next week - the very best rehab clinic. So if Dad has a chance, that place is it. So fingers-crossed they are as good as everyone says and can turn very small steps into steps, to some kind of recovery.

Dad working in Genoa, Italy, May 59

So tomorrow is dad’s birthday and he’ll be 76. Christopher Noel Roche, our Dad, was born in Limerick, Ireland in 1935. And he had style. Bags of it. He showed me how to stuff and pull your hanky in your jacket pocket the correct way. Showed me how to tie a half Windsor knot when I asked him. Got rid of his cravats from the 70s before I had a chance to get my hands on them. Looking back through the pictures [see some below] I can see how Dad was “bang on trend” back in his younger dayds. He clearly had an eye for it. As as I look back to the 50s and 60s for my style cues, turns out I just have to look at pictures of Dad from that time :) Though truth be told Dad was a lucky bastard when it came to wearing jackets.

Rocking the desert military look on holiday in Majorca, 1967

Dad was a separates man and by that I mean he didn’t really wear a suit. I think he stopped that practice in the 60s [obviously after a few times going to London’s East End tailors like any respectable gent of the day to get his suit]. But from the late 60s or so, I’m pretty sure Dad was a separates man - a sports jacket or blazer and separate trousers. This approach allows a man to build up a collection of different jackets, trousers, shirts and ties etc. And as long as you know the rules of combining what with not, you can create a very large set of combinations from a small selection of choice clothes. Ideal for the working man. Though by the time I knew Dad, he had an impressive, immaculately turned out wardrobe of jackets, shirts and trousers. Dad was fastidious about hanging his clothes. Through Dad I learnt about combining stripes with check patterns, what colour shirts went with what jackets and the like. What is style not fashion. The best lesson in dressing well a man can have I’d say.

Dad in Hamburg [think] in the 60s

Dad was one of those guys who was always well turned out, clean shaven, always on time. And he smiled and treated all equally. Always. Period. If one did nothing else in life, that would be enough. Dad was awesome - and he looked good too :)

NB: apologies for poor quality of images [iphone shots of old photos]

Some thanks

Thank you to everyone for your kind words and support during this time for Mum, Sean, Emma and our families [Rach, Anne, Mark, Finn, Neve, Daniel, Oliver and Samuel]. To those of his friends who read this, stay close for my Mum. But I want us all to remember why my Dad was awesome in life. And remain hopeful.

Previous My Dad is Awesome posts

Post 1: Dad’s memory

Post 2: Dad was cool about weapons

3:13 pm • 9 December 2011 • 11 notes • View comments

Reasons why My Dad is Awesome: Dad was cool about guns & weapons

Dad was cool about weapons. Like guns, swords & knives :)

He never glorified guns, was always very sensible about them and talked very clearly about being safe with them. But Dad liked weapons. They were a fixture of his home life growing up - his brother Jimmy grew up to be “the best shot in Ireland”. Dad and his three brothers all shot. But it was Jimmy who Dad always mentioned. Jimmy hunted, kept a load of lovely gundogs until the end of his life and was about as good as they get with a shotgun. His shotgun was an “extension of his right arm”. Dad grew up around shooting game birds and rabbits. They had shotguns & .22 rifles. But I think Dad was more into the aesthetics of guns than shooting them. More knowledgeable about the names and makers of guns than how best to breathe while firing a gun. Sean [my older brother] taught me all that. But lets remember guns don’t kills people, rappers do [Dad hated rap music. Even with this level of irony.]

Dad at the office with Les, 1970 - notice the drawings of guns in the background. Points will be awarded to those who can name them

So I grew up with guns, swords & whole shit-load of bayonets - Dad got given a collection of about 20 bayonets by a friend years back. The bayonets started life hanging together on a wall as any good collection should. But [I think] when we moved house from Manor Lane to Baring Road, there wasn’t a den [which Dad built] with a wall. And so the house kinda got weaponised. Bayonets migrated behind my parents bed and into nooks of the house. I remember when we got burgled, the burglars found all the bayonets behind the bed and put them on the bed. I like to think they thought: “Thank fuck no ones here!”

I liked the bayonets. I loved the variations of them, always surprised me there were these differences. One was as long as a short sword easily. While one, an American one, was all green. Looked very Vietnam. But I especially liked this one with a little hook to the end. That one I took when was in the Army cadets - 9th regiment, 96 battery up the road. There was me in uniform and belt kit, 14, wandering up the road with a 9 inch bladed bayonet on my belt. A knife that would not have fit on any British rifle. But hey, it looked cool. And I really needed to look cool. I never got on well with the lads there. The boys from Oval I got on famously with on annual camp, but not my own from 96. But that’s another story.

When you grow up with something in your house, even weapons, it just seems normal. And Dad taught me that. I wasn’t very into guns and rifles. If that sounds odd to some of you, you haven’t met my brother Sean, who has spent his childhood and adulthood determined to be a crack-shot with a rifle. Shoots all the time. Its a Roche thing clearly. I like them, but like Dad probably more the aesthetics.

Though I did get into swords :) And I think I always got a lot of wholesome, Dad approval when I fenced at school. Though I’m sure there were two bones in Dad which kept conflicting. One was his Irish, poor upbringing, my son’s fencing! And the other that watched Basil Rathbone films. “Did you know he was a fencing Master, Fergy?”. “Yes Dad”. His Basil bone always won out I reckon. We both liked swords. Dad was cool about weapons.

Basil Rathbone fencing

Basil Rathbone fencing

Previous My Dad is Awesome posts

Post 1: Dad’s memory

Some thanks

Thank you to everyone for your kind words and support during this time for Mum, Sean, Emma and our families [Rach, Anne, Mark, Finn, Neve, Daniel, Oliver and our newest addition Samuel]. To those of his friends who read this, stay close for my Mum. But I want us all to remember why my Dad was awesome in life. And remain hopeful.

1:57 pm • 12 October 2011 • View comments

Why my Dad is awesome [and other news concerning the double stroke that laid him low last week]

Did I know my Dad? I think so. Not as well as Mum. And I only know some of his youth in Ireland. Looking back I wish I’d known him when he was my age I think. He always said he enjoyed his thirties best [Mum agreed]. I think I know what he means, I’ve really enjoyed my thirties. At the time, Dad was a young architect, well dressed, Mum on his arm, in a great firm designing building in London and Europe.

Dad with Mum at home in 1969

Talking over the years to Sean and Emma [my brother and sister] I wonder how our different experiences with him have shaped our memories of him. For me it’s things like the stories he’d tell, breaking me with “don’t try, succeed”, his overwhelming “nice guy” nature and how he showed me I could change physical things around me - like your home - into whatever you wanted them to be.

Right now, he’s lying there in that special bed in Kings College Hospital, probably dying, hit twice with strokes to both sides of the brain. He’s stable, but unconscious. Its day 6 since the fall. I hope against hope while others kindly pray he’ll get better. But he probably won’t. Not this time. He fought this once before. Ten years ago he got taken out by a stroke. And he won :) Against all prognoses, he got better and eventually walked out of the hospital and returned home. At the time it seemed long, slow and amazing how my dad defied the odds. But it wasn’t blind luck. My dad believed he could get better and willed it. My dad taught me the proverb: “where there’s a will there’s a way”. Always stuck with me and he proved it last time. But not this time I think.

Dad’s memory

My dad had a near photographic memory. Never kept a notebook. I favour the Moleskine. The soft black leather ones, with the squared paper, in large. I’m on my eighth. But Dad never needed one. He just remembered everything. Names, faces, dates, appointments, stuff to do. He’d rock up to his client meeting, sans notepad, and just remember stuff. And d’you know how my Dad would tell someone about this particular skill of his…

Original photo of the Hilton Hotel at Heathrow my Dad designed [can’t remember if it was with Siefert’s or his own practice]

Dad worked for Seifert through the 50s, 60s and into the 70s. Richard Seifert was an entrepreneurial businessman who ran the architectural practice. It was a big, commercial architects’ office, based in London. And Dad was one his brilliant, young architects. Three times faster than everyone else, smart, liked, hard-working and desperate for any job abroad. Dad went to client meetings with Seifert in his Rolls. I don’t know how long Seifert had this Rolls Royce car or how often they went to meetings in them instead of using the Tube. But I have this abiding memory of Seifert “who had a Rolls” as Dad used to reminisce about these heydays. And them going to council & hotel client meetings in it. Anyhow, along Dad went with Seifert and learnt what he could from this front-man who “never drew”. But who was a savvy businessman with the right connections. Here’s what his Guardian obituary says:

“…through serendipitous connections and hard work Seifert soon became an awe-inspiring figure in the world of commercial development. From the early 1960s until his retirement in the 1980s, his reputation for speed and mastery of planning law made him the doyen of commercial architects, not merely in London but also in provincial cities, and later in mainland Europe as well.” Guardian, Oct 29 2001

Seifert could quote from letters, contracts and planning law after reading them just once. He had a photographic memory. A proper, bona fide, read-it-once, recall-it-always kind of memory going on. Dad never said I have a “near-photographic memory”. I said that. But from all the conversation I had with Dad, his approach to remembering stuff, no notepad, and his skill at remembering events “it was June 1964, and Ray, Jean-Paul, the head manager at the Carlton Hotel and me…” Dad had an amazing memory. It all became abruptly obvious last time he had a stroke, as he his short-term memory became shot. He’d go to the door and forget where he was going. He got better, got used to being merely mortal like the rest of us. But once upon a time, my Dad had an awesome memory.

Some thanks

3:45 pm • 11 October 2011 • 2 notes • View comments

Film Selector!

If your coming along on Monday 13th June, select your film choices below. If your not coming, don’t play. End of the week, we’ll have our film choices for the evening. In the event of a tie, I get to arbitrarily decide over a cup of tea. Happy selecting…

5:10 pm • 31 May 2011 • 1 note • View comments

iwdrm:

“We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”

The Truman Show (1998)

5:40 pm • 14 April 2011 • 11,549 notes • View comments

True love…am creating my mum & dad’s anniversary invite card & I’m using this pic from their wedding day. Look at my dad’s face…smitten. I know from talking to my mum she didn’t feel the same way on the day. Took her a couple more years :) And d’you know what my dad said on the big day: “I love you enough for the both of us”. aahhh….

How would one rate the experience of true love?! Now that’d be a challenge. For more info on true love, watch what Miracle Max & Valerie from Princess Bride have to say on the subject.

11:52 am • 18 March 2011 • View comments