The white man’s burden
Uncle Knobhead has left the building…
It is easy to feel sympathy for my Dad’s Brother who has outlived all his siblings and now lives alone in Canada. His arrival, however, makes it dissipate rapidly…
He lets us know roughly when he’ll be coming over in advance but not his itinerary. He rings the night before and tells us what time his train will be arriving in Leeds for an overnight stopover. (He is too old to rent hire cars now). The long retired tend to forget that the rest of us work for a living! The consequence of this is that he ends up having to sit in the station for several hours waiting for one of us to turn up. He likes to take us out for a meal, but is invariably rude to the staff. He assumes that everyone else is fascinated in railway modelling. He repeats himself and tells us stories we have heard before, sometimes earlier on. He discusses all of his latest illnesses at length. He rambles on about dull people we don’t know or particularly care about. He laments that he is going to die soon and brings us old photos & bric-a-brac in maudlin moments. (We now have a lot of them). He assures us that he isn’t racist, just zero tolerance. Despite not being racist, his conversations are littered with bigoted references to “blacks & coolies”. He is a grumpy old man.
Did he really have to tell us that when he went to Sunday School in the 1930s he was given a tiny coin envelope to bring back next week, printed with “The White Man’s Burden” on it, for starving children in Africa?
I still feel a little sad for him, but only between visits.
