We are all made up of collections of stories. Our lives are stories; we recount what happened in our day when we come home, we tell our kids what will happen when we take them to the zoo, we retell happenings from our past. Some of these stories are small, some are bigger. Some are overarching and become the story of our life. I have stories about my ancestors. Stories about those that are still living, and stories about those that I still remember but who have died. And I have stories about ancestors who I never knew but only know of through the stories themselves.
These are my stories. The ones I tell the kids when circumstances remind me of them. If I am reminded of a story two days in succession then I will tell the same story two days in succession, and halfway through, my kids will usually tell me that they have already heard it. ‘Yeah, but it’s a good story’, I say. ‘Maybe I ought to write them all down, then I could just give you the page numbers instead’. Well that is exactly what I did, so here are my favourite dad stories. Most of them are mine, but some of them are stories told to me by others that I repeat because they are so good or because they tickle my fancy in some way.
Read in these pages my account of…
The difficulties of explaining guinea-pigs to Russians
How Stubby and I set fire to the house while making unstable potassium compounds
The trauma of the banana-split I couldn’t finish eating when I was a child
Why I now have part of the Eiffel Tower in my study
How our O'level German teacher could eviscerate you without even raising his voice
What happened when I tied my foot to a bicycle with string
Sitting in a curry house and proving that The Arnolfini Wedding was painted by a Belgian painter
Hitting computers in Manchester University’s research labs with mallets
What happened when Jeff’s gear stick came off in his hand
Why I offered over a thousand pounds for some pencils
And more! Another 90 to be precise.
