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Off to Devon today to celebrate the 80th birthday of the Headmaster’s Son’s Father. TK Herring MSc completed eight decades on planet earth today and there seems to be life in the old dog yet. It makes no sense to me as I am pretty sure my dad is somewhere around about 45 years of age. Though that would make me 14 and my daughter minus 33.
My parents had booked out an entire guest house along a long windy road in the middle of the countryside and remarkably all their kids and grand-kids made it to the happening. It took some getting there though. We set off ridiculously early at around about 11, but thanks to terrible traffic we weren’t at the hotel until after 5. But there was time for Phoebe to exhaust everyone running around the small garden (my only tactic was to spin her round until she was dizzy, which meant she would fall over for the next two minutes and be unable to get up to too much mischief- only drawback was that I was dizzy too and she seemed to recover quicker than me.
We had a little evening idyll with sunshine and bleating sheep and champagne (though I had a cup of tea due to my unbreakable resolve) and then we moved inside for a family dinner, with my daughter sleeping in the pram in the lounge. It was a moving celebration for a remarkable man, who is much loved by his family, his community and his ex-students. My brother had been asked to give a speech and modestly claimed he was the last person who should do so, but he had put together a complex and moving monologue tying in some of his personal clashes with his father, with his own realisation of what made the man remarkable. He had tracked down a copy of my dad’s dissertation in mathematics from the University of Manchester in 1959. It was all about the boundary layer near the stagnation point in hypersonic flow past a sphere. Obviously every primary school kid in the world knows all about that now. But this was still the 1950s and boundary layer mathematics was in its infancy.
It was incredibly complex and impenetrable but reminded us all that there was a whole life for TK Herring before we all bouldered in and wrecked everything. Dad talked about having worked on computers back then and now being unable to work his iPad. That seemed impossible. Computers in 1959? But indeed, his dissertation mentioned the Mercury computer and I googled it and it has quite a history behind it.
There was laughter and tears and needless apologies. Because being in a family means sorry is as taken for granted as is love. But still nice to express it sometimes. And a fantastic level of effort and impressive skills from my big brother.
We have an amazing and fortunate family and there’s as much hope for the future as there is pride in the past. After all, I am only 14 and have my whole life ahead of me.
I am pretty certain that we’ll be celebrating the 90th birthday of this ridiculous and remarkable old man. But I am glad that everyone wanted to be there to mark what he’s achieved with his first 80 (or 45) years.
