Hands up all those of you who still miss your Mum and Dad, perhaps long gone, and would love to be having a chat with them again . . .
Well, imagine my great pleasure when, in a well overdue de-clutter the other day, I came across a bagful of letters written to me by my old man, Donald Truscott RIP, when I was exiled in Liverpool in 1972-75.
Hadn’t seen them for decades. And I do mean bagful. Every single Friday, give or take, in his Falmouth home, he would type out those letters, anything from 200 to 600 words long.
I’m still wading through them – every one a delight - and I calculate the collection must come to something like 200-odd.
I was in my early 20s and Dad in his mid-50s. As well as amusing generation-spanning observations on life, the correspondence often included some gems of fatherly advice which, looking back now, I wish I could have taken more notice of then.
How about this, for instance:--
“Try not to be too impatient with people who, by virtue of age, cannot match your outlook or quickness of perception.
“You will be amazed how quickly the next 30 years will pass, when you will be approaching the time when youngsters tend to be a bit off-hand with you.”
Well, the Old Boy was dead right there, wasn’t he!
In another letter, he asked: “Do you remember writing to Kenneth Wolstenholme with suggestions for improving his commentating?”
No, I don’t remember that now, but I guess it’s just the sort of daft thing I might have done at the time (which would have been when I was still at the Falmouth Packet, first time round, barely into my 20s).
That’s right . . . Kenneth Wolstenholme, who still ranks today as one of our greatest-ever football commentators - not least with his famous World Cup Final line “some people think it’s all over; it is now” – being advised by a cocky young upstart on a tiny local weekly newspaper!
Ah well, we always did believe we could change the world when we were young, didn’t we!
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