Note: I refer to this recording as a 'chat' although perhaps it is more realistic to interpret it as another one of Dad's confident lectures to me. The photos are a fairly recent one of me against part of my library, and one of him as a young man, in his university days (pictured in the snow in my grandmother's yard).

 

I regular defer under the pressure of these long-winded, slow burning speeches, and allow him time to say his piece - at least as much as I can reasonably bear; one has to find a way to interject somehow or else he would just keep on talking indefinitely, missing the point, brokering no response (nor requiring any) - and prefer not to interrupt too much, allowing him to impart vast reams of data to me. However, he rarely affords me the same favour, usually cutting me off after a single, one line utterance, if that, in rude impatience, or talking over me as I am speaking, or telling me angrily 'that's what I'm saying!' when it is evident to me that it is nothing of the sort, putting me on edge psychologically, and leaving me nervous, stuttering, or otherwise prone to raising my voice to 'compete for airtime'.

 

It is true that my father is a very knowledgeable and scholarly individual, and a very bright man; a real font of knowledge - that cannot be debated - however, despite this, it is (and was at the time) my conclusion that he was invariably incorrect about the inferences he made from the true historical trivia he shared. It's a pity I never was afforded the opportunity by him to lay out my own case to anywhere near the same level of detail, resigning myself to mere hurried asides and awkward one phrase chip-ins (alluding to much more, not that he noticed), as he continued to rattle on and on and on, to a sometimes patronising level of 'explanation', where one example could have been given, and the point already assimilated by me, and yet he provided ten.

 

I have, mercifully, had a chance to write at length in my book though, The Less Than Jolly Heretic (not that he will ever bring himself to read it, as has been stated to me, as indeed he has historically replied regarding all of my written work - I have written 13 books, only for him to scoff at them, unopened, and then criticise them to the hilt), and direct readers to that instead for my comprehensive arguments on the - total - non-existence of 'Jesus Christ', Christianity's responsibility for the fall of Rome (and the violent suppression and effective extinction of pagan values in much of Europe; at least West of the Rhine) and of both a benighted value-shift from Greco-Roman times to our Christian present and the need to reconsider these post-Christian values carefully, and return to a Greco-Roman value system more immediate and extensive by far than what my father summarised as 'making sacrifices to the Gods' (although, ironically, he was on the right track).