Me an’ my girl - well, one of them - in Florida .
October 1998.
Stephanie, at 14 years old, had one of those daft adolescent
obsessions: she was collecting everything and anything dolphin-shaped. Her
bedroom was crammed with such crap.
So, when we fixed on Florida
as an exciting and exotic holiday destination, the notion of swimming with
real-life dolphins arose. She swam like a fish herself, anyway; on a
“swimathon” in Telford , she had gone on for
mile after mile of slow, stately, streamlined lengths of the pool. Her shape is
curvaceous and athletic, a shape inherited from her great grandmother Lilian
Russell, a swimming champion before the Great War.
As a parent, it is most satisfying to make the dreams of
one’s offspring come true. Stephanie absorbed all the instruction given by the
Dolphin Centre staff, listening intently to the do’s and don’ts of relating to
these intelligent mammals with an almost spiritual aura. They would be watching
her through one beadly little observant eye as she looped around the pool. When
it was all over, she was quiet and subdued – the tranquility of somebody on
Cloud Nine.
(Could we just clear up an earlier statement – swam like a fish herself. I am well
aware that dolphins are not fish. I have a recording of a four-year-old Stephanie
talking to me over a picture-book. At one point, discussing the phenotypes of the animal kingdom she exclaims in a chirpy,
musical, French-accented voice, “dass not a way-ull! Dass a big feesh!”)
Not a big feesh, and that's final!
So on Dad-days, we had some adventure. Original experience
not prescribed by any overcautious engineer with a degree in delivering British
Standard Thrill Units to brain-dead and passive punters.
On one such Dad Day, we passed a shooting gallery. “D’you fancy it?” I asked Steph. We parked up, and entered through the glass doors, feeling a little self conscious. Would the place be full of aggressive gun-nuts?
Stephanie was up for it in principle, and I confirmed with the warmongers
inside that 14 was not too young to have a blast. “Oh, we have people as young
as ten come here and shoot,” said the beefy moustachoied manager. So I asked Steph
if she would like to have a blast. She declined.
They asked me what I would like to shoot with. Inside the
glass cabinets was an obscene array of gunmetal-grey lethal hardware. Let us
not forget that these weapons are made to kill living creatures, including
human beings. Faced with such choice, such abundance, such a macho
testosterene-filled sack of toys, I went in the opposite direction to the
prevailing ethos and asked for the simplest gun they had.
“Oh, then how about a revolver? A twenny-two.” (Translation:
How about a simple hand-gun as opposed to a feckin machine pistol that sprays
bullets out like a hosepipe. How about a revolver, a thing with six bullets in
a revolving chamber rather than a square magazine that slots into the handle
and fires a dozen bullets in quick succession. How about a 22-calibre bullet (a
tiny one) rather than a great big thing that would sit heavily in the palm of
your hand?)
So I take my little handgun, my ear defenders, and my squalid
little box of fifty bullets. I go forward into the shooting gallery. It is set
up for six shooters (not six-shooters as in Billy the Kid, but six enthusiasts
like me). The shooter stands in a sort of stall, like a horse in a race, with
up to five like-minded people either side. Over to my right, Stephanie is
watching through a plate-glass window. In front of me, maybe twenty yards away,
is a cardboard target. I decide to stand lags apart with both hands on the
pistol, which I believe I have heard referred to as the "Weaver Stance", and begin to fire at the target. It kicks lightly in my hands. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.
I open the chamber as shown, spill out the empty shells into a bucket and
(taking care to keep the weapon pointed downrange as instructed) and insert
another six bullets. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Such fun!
As I am doing my modest thing, a person steps into the stall
on my left. This is one serious dude. His gun is three times the size of mine.
I think it is a Colt 45. When he fires his first shot, the noise hurts my ears,
even through the ear defenders. He is theatrical. He fires with only one hand.
BANG! He goes down one one knee, and blasts a shot off. BANG! I do not turn to look
at him. I don’t want any trouble. This guy is Dead Eye Dick, or Dirty Harry, or Slim Pickens, or just another silly boy with a toy. Afterwards, Steph
would say to me, “Daddy, your gun only sent out a bit of smoke, but that man’s
gun had a great flame coming out of his.”
And then I hear an angry raised voice speaking to Dead Eye
Dick. It is the Range Warden. “I told ya not to do that, ya goddam idiot! I
told ya! Get the hell outta here!”
When I have finished popping away at my targets, and am
safely away from the action, I ask the Range Warden what he had so exercised
him. He angrily tells me that the man on my left had had a problem with his gun. It had
stopped firing, and as a way of investigating had turned the gun towards
himself and peered down the barrel.
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On another Daddy-Day, we drive across the width of the
tongue of land that is Florida to Cape Canaveral . As a lad, the exploits of the Americans
and their heroic astronauts filled me with admiration. I followed the Mercury
programme with its solo astronauts, the Gemini programme with its pairs of
astronauts, and the Apollo programme with its trios. After leaving the Earth’s
orbit, and doing practise circles of the moon, they landed on it in 1969. For
the next few years they went back, ever more ambitious, even driving around the
dusty surface on “moon buggies” until dropping the whole thing.
Today, in 1998, there will be a Space Shuttle launch. The
crew will consist of the usual fit scientists and military men in their
thirties, but also the oldest man ever to go into space. John Glenn, or rather
Senator John Glenn as he now is, was the first American to orbit the Earth in a Mercury capsule. (We
should not forget that other Americans went into space before him, on so-called
sub-orbital flights, strapped onto unreliable rockets designed to do little more than lob a nuke onto the Russkies. We are also not likely to forget that the
Russkies beat them to orbit, with Yuri Gagarin circling around above their heads
whilst America ’s
rockets exploded spectacularly on the launch pad time after time.)
And today, septuagenarian John Glenn was going up again,
forty-plus years after he made history.
In the coastal towns around the Cape (renamed Cape Kennedy for a couple of decades until the notion of
naming such features after recent dignitaries was declared unworthy) they had
not seen such a turnout for many years. Amazingly, Space Shuttle launches had
become routine! People had almost lost interest in the four-monthly launches of
these wonderful machines. The crowd of sightseers has over the years been steadily dwindling,
and the John Glenn mission was an exception, a pleasant reminder to the locals of past glories. They try to charge us to park in the sidestreets of their coastal
villages. One young woman holds a placard inviting us to turn back to Jesus.
Looking out eastwards across the Atlantic ,
we await the launch with electric anticipation. At tee-minus-ten, the launch
is suspended: some dickhead in a Cessna light aircraft is circling the launch
pad too closely. We waited impatiently while they did what they had to do
(maybe chasing him off with military jets). We could visualise the astronauts
in their space suits, lying on their backs, breathing in the oxygen, tenser
than us mere spectators. And then, thrillingly, the count recommences.
Through somebody’s car radio we hear the dramatic
countdown. For me, the passage of time has never been so dramatic, so palpable,
so irreversible. As the seconds drops from the thirties and twenties to the
lower digits, an almighty yellow-white flame appears in the distance, and the
crackling sound of superheated air reaches our ears, and the mighty spaceship
muscles its way up, above the restraining gravity of Planet Earth, and gains
speed poised on its sparkling burst of fire, and crackles off into the sky, into the
distance, towards the horizon, leaving behind it a plume of passive smoke.
I could hardly contain myself. Emotions washed through me. I
was struck by the contrast between the excruciating pain of the pre-launch
delay and the bollocks-out action of the real launch. These Amercans I thought, they
either don’t go for it or they go for it full-on! Next to me, my callow
adolescent daughter was disdainfully wondering why these old guys get so
carried away by such mundane things as a spaceship launch. Can’t he be like normal people, I imagine she was wondering, and get excited on a roller coaster?
In the course of sampling the different cuisines on offer, I
had been shocked by the paucity of American cuisine. Wherever we went, it was
lower than canteen food. Part way through our trip, we discovered Cuban
cuisine, and Italian restaurants, and others. But there is no such ama-mull as
authentic Yankee grub. The low point came in the …. wait for it…. International
House of Pancakes, where a stack of floury slabs was placed in front of me.
Maybe four thousand calories on my plate. A squalid jar of mock-maple syrup to
pour upon it. After a quarter of this calorie-fest I was bloated, and had to
stop, embarrassed at wasting enough food for three people, imagining my mother mentioning all the starving children in India.
On one occasion, in a Chinese restaurant, I was so impressed
by the spectacular grub that I took a photo of my plate. When the eating was
good, I would make “yummmm” sounds, like some theatrical luvvie. “Ohhhhh, yeeees!” Stephanie put me down
with teenage skill: “Why can’t you just enjoy your food like normal people
without making all this noise?!”
On Steph Days we did the theme parks. There were some
spectacular rides and water slides that will last in my memory until… er… 1999.
And as part of Dad’s Days, we hit the famous Everglades . Situated at the southern tip of the Florida peninsula, the
Everglades slope downhill at a microscopically small rate. I mean the gradient is so slight it's literally as flat as a bowling green. The figure is
something like an inch a mile. This has resulted in endless grassland, or maybe
reedland, where the mosquito is king, and where the local indians were a hardy
bunch indeed. I think they were called the Pepsi Cola tribe before the white
men heroically wiped them out. Nineteenth century technology was more than a
match for the snivelling stone-age barbarians that had occupied the continent
for only a millennium or two.
Retreating back to the boat, and safety, we noticed a crocodile in the water, just eyes and snout showing, and an alligator basking on the bank. "Let's get a photo, Steph!" We approached a bit closer. "Still too far, Steph. A bit closer please!" Wicked swine that I am, I wanted to see a look of fear on her face before clicking the shutter.
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