The Solace of Art

There should come a time when life would resolve simple as astronauts' Earth ...but the parent beyond the morning mirror stares back baffled still. "Dad..?" I always got the same reply: "Keep carrying on. Say nowt."

By my age, his muscles gone thanks to the market's munificence, he was off on his bike, by six at his offices, his morning humiliations, the man-of-the-house "off the tools, on the dusters and vac." He was rough on Mum's expert advice until he pitched face-first in the ditch, heart-broken. "Tat-ta, May," but they got him back, grey-faced until he could grasp his pension.

Again and again he met Spring's offensive with his spade, retreating only before Winter to his hearth; except on Thursdays every blaspheming week for Evensong from some cathedral up and down the land, basso profundo in his armchair, echoing those last sounds of Christendom, sense worn away like stone with use, tunes shaped sure and strange as scythes, sunset gaudy above the rows of empty pews.

"Christ!" he said, when I drove him up the Malverns, all Wales at his back, and pointed out Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, spires Langland would have seen, sharp above the Midlands' fug. "Space rockets to search for a sky god," I suggested, "stuck on millennial hold." He said nothing at first, squinting across the shires, then softly, "Talk bloody sense."

From Letters and Characters (2000)