Tuesday 28 June 2016

On my son's 50th birthday

It's my son's 50th birthday today. It was a wonderful day when he was born. I could tell you lots of stories about him but there is one which epitomises a quality, among a number of good ones he has, and that is, determination.

At about the age of 15 or 16 my son told me he intended to be a journalist. I said to him, "Och everyone wants to be a journalist when they're young, I did too. Why don't you just forget about that for a while, go to university, get a degree and then you can decide what you want to do ? Being a journalist right now is a bit of a romantic notion." He listened to me. He didn't respond. I was sure my wisdom had gotten through.

A couple of weeks later while reading the sports pages of two of our local newspapers, I found in one a report on local golf competitions and in the other a report on a local rugby match. Both publications described the author of these articles respectively as their golf and rugby correspondents. The byline of these articles had the name of my son as their author.  What a man.