After my dad died, this thing happened that I can’t get past. It was when I went to the undertaker to get his ashes. They weren’t ready, said the lady there, but she did have his watch to give me. This she handed over in a little velvety bag. As she went into an explanation about the hold-up with the ashes, I got the watch out of the bag and just stared at it, stunned. I couldn’t believe that it was still ticking away, showing the correct time. I mean, I know: why would a cheap, battery-powered watch have died just because the wrist it had been around had gone for ever? At some level I must have thought it would have had the decency to stop at the moment that my dad stopped, as a mark of respect. But no, on it went regardless, heartless.
It’s funny what gets you. And what doesn’t. Dates, for example, mean nothing at all to me. I was asked on Sunday if I felt particularly sad about my dad. I didn’t really get where the question had come from, even though I knew it was Father’s Day as my daughters had texted me. I just didn’t make the connection. I felt no sadder or less sad on Sunday than I did on Saturday or Monday. And it’ll be the same when his birthday comes round; and the anniversary of his death, too. Dates are just random numbers. I’m not proud of feeling this way; I’ve been forgetting birthdays and anniversaries – my own as well as others’ – all my life, causing a fair amount of offence and upset in the process.
But now, oddly, dates did come into play, albeit in a different way, because my dad was forever mithering about the date being wrong on that bloody watch. I’d bought it for him because he’d knackered the one he’d had before, which I’d bought him to replace the one he’d bust before that. Even as he lost interest in nearly everything he’d ever been interested in, he got more obsessed with his watch, checking and rechecking it for accuracy, asking for another hole to be put in the strap. There was always some issue.
It was unclear to any of us, including him, why the time had become such a concern – as the very few things he did with this time weren’t time-specific at all. In trying to make the necessary date adjustments at the end of shorter months, he’d get in a right old muddle and mess it up completely. It reduced him to despair – probably because he could forgive himself for never coming close to mastering his iPhone, but couldn’t come to terms with being unable to change the date on his watch. “Sort this out, will you?” he’d say, every time I saw him, handing me the watch. If he’d bust it I’d buy him another one; if he hadn’t, I’d fix the date.
I don’t know how long I stood there in that undertakers, slack-jawed, watching the second hand make its merry way around the face, and the date being correct until the end of the next short month. Eventually I heard someone saying my name. It was the woman who had, probably, long finished telling me about when the ashes would be ready for collection, and couldn’t let my trance go on for ever. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d snapped her fingers a couple of times, like a stage hypnotist. Time moves on, obviously.
A clever, if cringe-making, ad campaign for an epically expensive Swiss watch brand featured a handsome father who looked like he ran a hedge fund, and his son who looked as if he’d soon be running one, too. “You never actually own a Patek Philippe,” the ad insisted. “You merely look after it for the next generation.” This is the kind of drivel you need to come up with, I suppose, in order to persuade people to part with tens of thousands of pounds for a mechanical watch when you can get a more accurate quartz one for 20 quid, like my dad’s. Although, when the senior hedge fund man’s time was up, his reassuringly expensive, precision-engineered timepiece – needing movement to wind it – would soon have stopped ticking and observed a period of mourning. Classy. Worth £30,000 of anyone’s money.
But our cheapo watch just ticked remorselessly on. A bit of time passed, and my mum went off to Croatia for a while. Before she left, she happened to sow some chilli seeds. Not in memoriam or anything like that – she just had some seeds and a bit of soil in a tray, so thought she may as well bung them in. Now she realised she wouldn’t be there to water them, so nothing would come of them. Whatever, she shrugged. After a couple of weeks I popped in to check the house and saw that every seed had germinated and countless nascent chilli plants were fighting for space, gasping for air and light.
I took them home with me and tried to pick out the strongest for replanting. The task proved beyond me. I couldn’t dispatch any of them. So now I sit here at my desk with my dad’s watch missing not a beat and no fewer than 54 chilli plants crowding out the window sill. It feels like it has to be this way. Yesterday a pigeon got in the flat and, in the ensuing shooing, set about trampling my crop. I wondered if it was my dad come back to tell me to stop being a prat, get a grip, bin the watch and stop the chilli madness. But I can’t comply. The pigeon damage turned out to be less severe than feared. Five of the plants looked doomed but three have rallied overnight and I’m hopeful the other two will pull through. And I’ve only just at this moment remembered that my dad’s nickname at school was Chilly. Funny that. Anyway, if you see me around and want a chilli plant then please let me know. I need to disperse them before that pigeon comes back for another go.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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