Since you’ve been gone

In June 1985, I took this photo as I sat
On the back door step with my dad as he had a cigarette and he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house.

It was his fiftieth birthday and he had just said to me that he wouldn’t see his fifty first. I was really angry and annoyed with him.

My mum’s boss and friend was not that much older (might have been younger) and was dying of cancer. I said; you are healthy (apart from the fags) you’re only fifty you can’t think like that. And he shrugged and said okay.

And then we laughed because I was going out on a date with an erector.






But he was right; he never did see his 51st.