Small distractions from It All, a thread:

my dad once rented Midnight Cowboy because he thought it was a western

my mum once drunkenly demanded that the mayor of a small scottish town pull over the rolls-royce they were in so she could get some fish and chips

My dad has accidentally cut two fingers off on two separate occasions and both times made my mum drive him to the local hospital. Mum can’t drive.

Yes. My father is nuts.

I once sparked a small manhunt when I took my French listening GCSE test in the wrong classroom and nobody knew where I was.

There is a photograph of my father, from his boxing days, hanging up in a pub in Scotland. My parents were there on holiday, and the barman recognised him. A baffling series of events after this is how my mum was in a position to demand fish and chips from the mayor.

I did ballet for a while last year. That’s it, that’s the joke.

We’re pretty sure dad lied about his age to join the Navy.

When he was about 16 he was put in charge of watching for pilot lights from other ships, and mistook the lights of an American highway for another ship.

One of my uncles went missing at sea. He was missing for a couple of years according to my brother. One day he just turned up at the house. My aunt Dolly, his sister, fainted and he just went “The hell’s wrong with her? What’s for dinner?”

Another uncle was warned away from two local hardmen and, displaying that customary Devlin contrariness, walked up to them and said “Would either of you two gentlemen care to fight outside?”

(The story goes that they knew him by reputation and politely declined, but I’m not so sure how true that is.)

Dad was about 4 during the Belfast Blitz. His father, deciding that a bomb fell “a bit close” to the house, arranged for the 10 children to move to the country. He literally had them all walk. When they got there he decided he didn’t like the place and made them all come home.

Dad was once in charge of collecting the money from a council car park. He went on leave for a bit and when he came back nobody bothered to tell that him the IRA had taken it over during his absence. He went to collect the earnings as usual.

I can only imagine how this compact, balding man demanding the takings from the car park must have gone done with the new owners. In the end he was forced to do a U-Turn through the barrier to hightail it out of there.

He’s fallen off a roof twice and landed on his feet both times.

I once came home drunk and realised to my horror that I’d forgotten my keys. I knew I’d be skinned alive if the father caught me (he’s nuts, remember) so I climbed over the conservatory roof to let myself in the back door. I fell off the roof and DIDN’T land on my feet.

Nobody said anything about the bruising I had on one side of my body from landing in the pile of wood and piping my dad had piled just outside the conservatory. Years later a passing remark from my dad revealed he’d spotted me from his bedroom window.

(Yes in those days the back door to the conservatory remained unlocked for reasons I still don’t fully understand. I slept on the tiny conservatory couch. It was locked not long after that.)

Dad was late to his own wedding because he decided that he personally needed to pick up an aunt I have never heard of outside of the context of this story.

My granny was engaged to a dishy US soldier called Casey Jones, and she broke it off when she met my gramps. He cycled from Strabane to Fivemiletown just to meet her, and I suppose we all love a trier. Casey’s reaction to the news goes unrecorded.

My dad, you’ve probably guessed, isn’t exactly a nervous type (though God knows he should be). He still got his mate to ask my mum out for him. Mum thought he was still married and told him to go to hell. The friend’s mediation services were called on several more times.

My parents once fell out for a whole day because they argued about what colour my hair is, both refusing to utter the word “ginger”.

My half-sister once threw away her still-lit cigarette in a crowded market only to watch in horror as it sailed through the air and landed in a random person’s bag.

My half-brother once tried to bullshit the police over not wearing his seatbelt by claiming that he had been wearing it but decided to take it off.

The same brother slept in a drawer for the first year or so of his life.

My gramps was an electrician. He was also colour-blind.

My father is deaf in one ear. He has told us several different versions of how this happened, from flooding to explosions to infections.

One time he did indeed have a bad infection in the afflicted ear and the girl he was seeing at the time remarked that the nearby cows must have done a tremendous shit nearby, on account of the stink. Lads, it was my dad’s ear.

He has a slight scar on his forehead. He claims he got it from a boxing match but he actually got it because he bumped his head on the open boot of the car.

He is missing a front tooth (now two, actually) and wore a bizarre false tooth that hooked around his back teeth. It haunted my childhood.

Does anyone else’s dad swear by iodine as a catch-all cure for what ails ye?

My grandfather Devlin was born in 1893 and I think you can tell.

The first and only film my great-grandmother ever saw featured a newsreel about her son's death.

Family lore links us to the Burke of Burke and Hare fame. I don't know. Can you see a resemblance?

I once went for a walk while on break from my Language Assistant job in France and got lost, and ended up leaping through people's gardens to make it back to work in time.

Daniel Johnston once asked if he could kiss me on the cheek.

Jeffrey Lewis once complimented my hair.

One of my primary writing motivations is the time I told one of my favourite authors - to her face - that I was writing a book because I was inspired by a talk she gave. She obviously will not remember this, but I think about it often and am driven by sheer pride.

A Parisian man asked me for my hand in marriage when I was 18.

One of my dad's first jobs was walking around the shipyard with a plank of wood and giving everyone a heads-up that the boss was coming.

He said that the men working in the shipyard had a thing where they'd use a system of pulleys to raise and lower their tea kettles from the fires burning below.

My grandfather bought little kid dad a pet rat, which lasted for the grand total of one (1) hour, after which dad let it out of the cage and it escaped down a drain.

Shortly after we moved to Bangor our (unnamed) cat had kittens in the middle of the night. I was about four or five and woke up to a mysterious mewling sound. There they were in the safe, square gap between the sofa, the wall, and the chair.

One of the kittens was called Whitesocks, for his four white paws.

I often hid in that little gap as well, reading the filthy erotic novels I found among my mum’s stuff.

when my mum was pregnant with my sister, she went and had a routine scan and was told all was well. after she left the hospital my father receiver a panicked phone call and was told she was in actually in labour and had to return *right now*.

Nobody, by the way, told me directly that mum was going to have another baby. I went with her to the hospital and watched her get the scan and the penny slowly dropped. Nobody has explained to my satisfaction why it was better to make me guess.

One day in September I walked home from school and found my dad at the doorway. “You’ve a wee sister.” I started jumping up and down on the sofa.

I make fun of her a lot, but I adored my sister when she was born and she is my best friend.

Whitesocks didn’t live with us, but he definitely considered us his subjects.

He lived to be a right old cat, and we think he has a couple of great-grand cats on the prowl about the place. That could equally be our sentimental thinking.

My dad's best friend? A seagull.

My mother hates this, but dad has befriended a seagull which summons him every morning by knocking on their bedroom window.

My mother has befriended a cat which absolutely loathes the seagull.

The seagull also comes into the conservatory if dad does not respond to its summons.

This cat, if it even so much as suspects that the seagull is in the vicinity, will totally lose its shit.

I feel like I’m in a Philip Pullman novel.

I did once befriend a spider that lived in a web next to my bed in the cottage we we rented in Donegal when I was five.

I am using the term “befriend” even though I am aware of how problematic it is, as I am sure the spider was decidedly not friends with me, a loud and strange five year old girl.

On that same trip to Donegal I distinctly remember going to a wedding that I'm 99% sure we weren't invited to.

My dad bought some turf while on that holiday. My mum ended up chatting to the man who sold it, with me tagging along for the craic. I had lost a tooth and the man gave me the money my dad paid him for the turf.

On a holiday before I was born, my parents stayed with a woman they call Mrs Soup. I have no idea if that is her name or not. Mum convinced herself that Mrs Soup's nephew - described by my dad as being "build like a fucking door" - stole her purse.

Dad's approach to this was "I'm just going to ask him. And if he says no, I'm just going to get stuck in." He was sweatin'. This man was massive. He tapped him on the shoulder and...

...was yanked backwards through the door by my mother, who had found the purse under her pillow. "I didn't like the look of thon, so I hid it." Aye, and a good thing too.

I once auditioned for a small local film and was described as "weird looking", which is true but, all the same, MADAM, how DARE you.

When I was 13 I auditioned for a pantomime and ended up getting picked up and thrown across the stage by this fully grown man who was also somehow auditioning for this thing that was for 12-15 year olds??

That was around the time I stopped doing that stuff, which is a shame because I enjoyed it and also had a crush on one of the actors.

Speaking of actors I have crushed on, I had an out of character crush on Douglas Henshall for the amount of time it took me to watch Shetland (a day).

I very occasionally fall deeply in love with the wrong people.

Goodness, that is not meant to be a statement on random crushes on Douglas Henshall.

When I lived in France I was asked out by a handsome man who, when I turned him down, also offered to buy me a bicycle. Alas.

Three (four?) years ago, my sister and I went to Copenhagen and I got on the Star Flyer, which whirled me around above the city at night. They seated me next to a small boy who chatted away to me in a language I didn't understand. Eventually he just went OH FUCK.

I thought I was going to be too heavy to go on the Star Flyer until a nice Danish man told me that each chain (4) attached to the seat can hold 1 tonne. "And you aren't four tonnes, are you?"

The way to my heart would probably be to take me back to Copenhagen.

My father was in Copenhagen when he was in the Navy and, god love him, he tried to give us tips about where to go, with information that was over 60 years out of date.

He has also been to New York, Aruba, Egypt. And that's just the places I remember off the top of my head. He has refused to travel anywhere for as long as I have known him, except by car or by boat.

His ideal holiday destination is, god love him, Butlins.

Although the one time we went there he refused to leave the hotel.

This was Butlin's Ayr, which I think has since been renamed Haven. He got lost on the way there and decided to take it out on Scotland as a whole.

Dad is, by the way, a terrible prude, which is what makes that Midnight Cowboy thing extra hilarious.

He once walked out of a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire.

He insisted on me buying him a copy of Raging Bull, only to switch it off halfway because of the bad language, which he insists wasn't in the original.

He is intrigued by social media, but too prideful to admit it after a lifetime of saying that it was a waste of time. He refers to every digital form of communication as a "tweet".

He asked my sister for a go on her laptop, but gave up after a while because it was “too slow”.

I set up my folks with the streaming services I’m subscribed to, including Prime, and once in a while I get an email receipt for a movie like Gangster Squad, because dad, seeing a “purchase £3.50” button got confused and thought it was free.

I once came downstairs and found him watching Pulp Fiction at 7.30am.

“Why don’t you write about the adventures of a wee man in a wee boat?” - my dad in a thinly veiled attempt to get me to write about him.

Every time my mother goes on holiday with my dad, someone invariably tries to chat her up.

One time my parents went to a bar and my mother sat a table while my dad went to get a drink. She found herself being interrogated by an American tourist. "Where are you from?", "Who are you with?", "What's your name?" etc. etc. etc.

Dad rejoined them and listened to this for a few minutes. Then, bored, he seized the man's tie and yanked his head down so that the interloper's chin rested on the table. "You want to know anything else?"

He's nuts, remember.

I have not inherited my mother's mysterious ability to charm literally every man she meets, but, to be honest, I'm fine with it.

I haven't inherited dad's...whatever you want to call it...but I did once kick a boy in the shins for pulling my hair.

A few years ago a random man grabbed my hair from behind and claimed to be "admiring it." It gave me a little fright. Only people I know pretty well are permitted to touch The Hair.

Sad to say, I did not kick him in the shins.

People do tend to seize on the hair, physically and metaphorically. I'm pretty sure nobody can describe me with any real accuracy other than "she has red hair!"

I tended to run away as a small child, to the point where my parents had to employ the dreaded baby reins.

Luckily I also had a massive pile of curly red hair. Exhibit A:

“Have you seen my daughter? She has red hair.” - my mum, the times I:

bolted from her at shopping centres ages 3-4
disappeared during my French listening exam

My tendency to disappear without the least idea of the chaos it causes is sort of a running joke.

My ex told my sister I “didn’t come home” one night. I’d been in the library until pretty late (I am a workaholic, I suppose) and came home around 2.30am, and went straight to bed. He didn’t tell Amy that bit.

Absolute bedlam the next day.

But to put it in context, that was the second time this year that my mysterious disappearance has sparked widespread alarm and dismay.

Also the second time that I was actually in bed and asleep the whole time.

I get that from my gramps, apparently, who did the same thing, to the point where he couldn’t be found on the morning of my parents’ wedding because he had decided to go for a short walk.

Everyone was out looking for him for at least an hour and a half (“short walk”), and were prepared to leave without him when he came ambling into the house. He couldn’t understand why everyone was so mad.

When my father had his heart attack, he decided to try and work it off.

Obviously that didn't work, so he thought he'd better head to the hospital. Rather than call for help he decided to hop in the car and nip over to the Mater. Halfway there he reconsidered and walked the rest of the way. "Hello there," he said at reception, and collapsed.

As far as my dad is concerned, the heart attack was a minor inconvenience that prevented him from getting back to work.

But Emma, you ask, what work could your father possibly be doing that warranted such a cavalier attitude towards his own health?

He retired years ago.

He will find work to do. Invite him round for lunch and he'll fix everything wrong in your house.

My half-brother does this too. He's an electrician and tends to have customers asking him if he wouldn't mind, since he's there, to clean their drains, wash their cars, fix their locks, and he'll bloody do it too.

My mother bumped into one of my half-sisters a few years ago, after not having seen her for some twenty-odd years, and the first thing she said was “Your voice has gotten awful deep.”

Here is a photo of my father from a recent video call.

He kept asking me to fix the camera angle for him, as if he's a fucking news anchor.