
I will not be buying a Father’s Day card and I hope many children will be crafting a homemade one this year rather than buying a smaltzy one from a card shop. Many fathers will have seen more of their children this year through working from home but others with elderly parents, maybe in a care home, will have been isolated from them. I lost my father a long time ago but still remember him fondly. He was a storyteller and could amuse children for hours with his ghostie stories and the like. I wonder what he would make of me with my Scarfaid blogs, spinning a yarn here and there. I wore a Yves Saint Laurent scarf yesterday to remind me of my mother’s birthday. I am wearing a similar one today for Father’s Day. Again by YSL, it is black silk with a border of chocolate brown daisy like spots. It reminds me of an occasion when my father turned up unannounced, late at night at my house. A knock at my door. Children asleep in bed, my husband away on business. I looked through the spy hole. There was my father with a blackened face rather like my dark scarf. It was midsummer, a fine night although dark and he was standing there in a creased plastic raincoat, bare legs, shoes with no socks and carrying a briefcase! I quickly ushered him in. What’s happened Dad? I’ve been mugged and they’ve made off with my clothes, says he. Forever, the storyteller and joker! This was not true. I have told of his adventures working in Russia as an engineer, but this time he had been working in London at Bankside when it was a power station and not the Tate Modern. He had worked late, it was a dirty job and he had taken a shower. He had just bought a new pair of shoes, prized them and took them with his briefcase into the shower room. When he came out, he found the changing room locked where he had left his clothes and he was alone in the power station. He found the emergency plastic raincoat in his briefcase. He thought he might be less conspicuous travelling on a bus back to Essex rather than the Underground and it had taken him hours to reach my home. It’s a pity he didn’t wash his face. I gave him some of my husband’s clothes, warned my mother of his predicament before he went to his own home. To this day I fall about laughing when I think of his fellow bus passengers. His story telling skills enabled him to convince the bus driver or maybe in these days they had a conductor/ticket collector on the bus, that he had left his wallet in his jacket and could not pay the fare.
I loved him dearly. My scarf is draped around one of his paintings and this final photo shows him with my mother on their Golden Wedding Day on a visit to California.

Busy Bee, Scarf Face!
Blog 87.
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