Why my Father hates Father's Day
20 June 2010
My father hates fathers day – “Another bloody American invention to make us waste more money”, he once declared. David Morrison, 68, of Wick, Caithness – poet, librarian, nationalist, romantic, drinker, friend of tinkers, drunks and passing strangers, painter of abstract landscapes, survivor of a dead rebellion. Growing up with a hippy idealist as a father posed strange problems for me in childhood. Most kids get to rebel against their boring, reactionary fathers, but how can you rebel against a rebel? In the 1970’s it was not an uncommon to see ‘big Dave’ marching round the quiet insular town of Wick, with long hair and beard, in sandals, handing out flyers for his home-grown festival of Poetry Folk and Jazz. He once got into trouble with the kirk for going round with a megaphone on the sabbath, shouting: ‘come and meet the poets in the pub!’ Our home was a haven for escapees; for women who looked like Joan Baez and men who ranted like Ginsberg. There were banjos and squeezeboxes, whiskeys and weeds, and strange mornings when I would wake to find the living room floor covered in sleeping bodies. In this, my father hey-day, people exhausted themselves in celebrating their own idealistic hand-made culture. My father believed in something which thirty years later seems almost impossible to grasp - that Scotland could, through faith in it’s own culture, gain pride enough to grow and become independent. He believed this could be achieved in a battle against the homogenising forces of the British Empire and American Capitalism. He believed that Scottish poetry could overthrow Elvis Presley. I say ‘believed’, because the story of my father’s life after the seventies is one of a heroic but failing struggle to keep alive an ideal, that in hindsight was doomed. My father failed at this life-project but succeeded in small ways. His energy has had a lasting effect on all he met, even, his sceptical son. One of the things that disturbs me about the world now is how banal it has become in its victory over rebels like my dad, and how very few people of conviction we come across these days. And I have learned something from the old hippy - its better to believe in the struggle, even if it seems hopeless, than it is to sit back and passively accept this mass-produced monotonous culture that stretches round the globe. Scottish poetry is actually better than Elvis. So will I be purchasing a fathers day card this year? Will I hell. Here’s to you big Dave.
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