ONE OF my father’s favourite stories to tell around the dinner table was about the time he almost lost his leg after a scrape involving a tree and metal railings went very badly.
His claim to fame, he says, was that his leg was saved because he was one of the first people in Scotland to be given penicillin. It even made the newspapers, he used to tell us proudly, although none of us have seen that clipping.
My dad’s life before I came along fascinates me. I believed every word he said, of course, so it may or may not be true that he helped build the Conwy Bridge and “invented’ the EK OK slogan for my home town of East Kilbride in the fledgling days of the town’s Development Corporation.
All of those stories came back to me this week when I read a report that one-third of Glaswegians regret not asking deceased relatives all about their lives.
The Ancestry.co.uk study found that while 44 per cent of Brits relish discussing the ups and downs of high-profile families like the Windsors and Beckhams around the Christmas dinner table, we don’t talk about our own nearest and dearest half as much.
I was a real daddy’s girl, used to hang on to his every word. But I was only 12 when he died – nine years after my mother – so I didn’t really get the chance to find out all I could have about either of them.
Read more: Let's not be critical of Wee Sleep Out events - they all help
I only recall a few details about my dad’s childhood, in the east end of Glasgow, and have only sketchy memories of the tales he would tell about my mum, or his parents, my grandparents, whom I never met. When you are 12 and your head is full of school and Duran Duran and watching the A-Team on the telly, you don’t think to ask proper questions. Now, I wish I had.
My brother is researching our family tree which, we laugh, must mean we are finally, officially “getting older” but it has been fascinating. Perhaps not unsurprisingly given the job I do, I want to unearth the stories behind the names and dates.
The study prompted Ancestry.co.uk to team up with a psychologist to create “The 12 Questions of Christmas” – things you should ask your family around the festive dinner table this year, covering subjects like school-day memories and who your best friends were.
I can see my children eye-rolling even as I write (“good grief, not the story of how you and dad met in the Pancake Place again, they will groan”) and maybe it is a “getting older” thing but I do think that, in these fractured times in which we live, discovering connections to the people in our past,
and to each other, is a rich and valuable thing to do.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here