SONS OF THE FATHERS

IF you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…

…Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!   (Rudyard Kipling)

It was positively the very last person I had wished to meet in the street that day. Or, indeed, any day come to think of it.  Billy bloody Bingham.

     ‘How the bloody hell are you diddling Joe, me old mate?’

     ‘Fine, just fine Billy,’ I mouthed by way of reply.

I grudgingly accepted his overlarge, yet bizarrely well manicured, paw in a travesty of a handshake. Desperately trying to alter the grimace on my face into a half-hearted smile, I heard myself say,

    ‘And how are you keeping Billy, family okay?’

     ‘Fine, just fine,’ he replied in mirror image.

I anticipated his question all too easily.

    ‘How’s ya boy doing Joe? Is he okay? Only we heard about your little…err…problem. If you get me drift.’

Problem? No problem to me or to my only son Josh, or ‘my boy’, as Billy so quaintly termed him. Billy revelled in the idea of me and mine having a ‘little problem’. I could almost hear him laughing in the pit of his grotesque beer belly at what he saw as our misfortune. He’d been the same since our schooldays, always trying to get one over on me, always striving to be top dog. I can honestly say he never succeeded though, thank God. He was unbearable enough as he was, not that I have anything against obese, gouty pub landlords per se, of course.

     My only son Joshua, you need to know, had suddenly decided a few months ago to come home and glibly declare to me that he was now gay. A homosexual – no less; damn it had upset me badly at first. Ever since his mother had died I had promised myself that I would support my only son in all he did, for better or worse. He was an intelligent and extremely sensitive boy, always had been, so maybe I wasn’t over-shocked at his revelation. It was the 21st century for God’s sake, and to utilise the current parlance, I was ‘cool’ with it.