Country air can soothe the soul and offer clarity, a lesson I have learnt since swapping the city for a Welsh valley. My wanderings across the hillside and forest have brought into focus parts of my life that were once too painful to touch.
My father died in 2023. I miss him terribly, but our relationship was never easy. In fact, it was fraught. Throughout my life, my father battled with alcoholism. It wasn’t just his problem—it was our family’s problem. This is always the case with addiction; the problem is never contained to the one person suffering with the disease, but instead seeps outwards, affecting everyone around the person. So, it might sound odd that I consider my father, who was prone to intoxicated rages and responsible for so much damage, to have been a good parent. But in many ways, he was a lovely father to me, both intentionally and inadvertently.
You might expect the child of a parent with a “Jekyll and Hyde” personality to be confused: how can someone be both good and bad? But instead, the experience brought me clarity and valuable insight: I understood from a very young age that adults weren’t infallible. This reinforced my own strength of character. It also taught me that the world was not black and white, as we are so often told as children, but that life is complicated and parents are more than one-dimensional figures. I still saw my father as a hero or god in the same way that my peers at school saw their parents, but as a Greek god or hero, susceptible to temptation and liable to make mistakes. I knew that parents could, as my father so often did, fail drastically.
The first film my father took his kids to watch in the cinema was Gandhi. I was nine years old and I wanted to watch ET but my father thought it was more important that I understood how political revolutions happened. Looking back now, I can see it was a key moment in my life; it ignited my long interest in politics.
In the summer holidays, bored, I would pick up my father’s books. He was an avid reader, mostly of history, politics and philosophy. Years later, he told me he had intentionally surrounded us with books as children, in the hope that one day we would read them. It was in the long, languorous days of the school holidays that I was first introduced to philosophy—such was the impact of these books that I studied the subject at university. Reading my father’s books has shaped my life.
Often on my long walks out here in the Cambrian Mountains, my father accompanies me in spirit. We take long strides together and this time he’s intoxicated not by alcohol but with nature.
I miss him in ways that I never could have imagined. For instance, I come from a very pious family and often found growing up in that sanctimonious environment stifling and insular. My father felt the same way. During my walks, I talk to him about the latest unpalatable conversation I might have had with my extended family about religion. Now that he’s no longer here, I see how refreshing it was to talk to him so openly about religion and our scepticism of it while he was alive. I reflect on how extraordinarily real his failures made him, when so many other people choose inauthenticity. I would rather live life truthfully in all its messiness than approach it wearing rubber gloves.
A couple of weeks ago, I sat on a stone on top of the valley and something unexpected occurred to me: I realised my father was the most deeply human person I have ever met. I say this not because he was known for any charity work but because both his passions and his troubles were so visible to everyone. Although this can be seen as a destructive way to live, as an adult, I understand it is also a brave way to live.
Because of my father, I have understood since childhood that we are all multifaceted. If I only saw the destructive side of my father, it would be because I had failed to understand the human condition. Through his complexities and troubles, I learnt what it means to fail and to forgive. This is a gift from my father, who failed in so many ways, but to whom I am eternally grateful.
