🎧 AUDIO QUACK 🎧
I was 5 when I was given life advice by Dad’s friend, Mike Dillon. “If you can laugh at yourself, nobody can laugh at you.” Mike was Irish and had long grey hair. I liked him because he talked funny and wore cowboy boots. I had never seen real-life cowboy boots outside of Disneyland before then.
It’s not one of those slogans you can frame and hang on your wall, but it’s a piece of advice that has stuck with me throughout my life, perhaps a little too much at times.
Dad attempted to give life advice, using a slogan– ‘Awareness’. He would say it and tap his forehead furiously. It was intended to teach my brothers and me to be aware of opportunities in business (more so than being aware of elderly people trying to cross the road). However, instead of creating a hard-hitting motto for his children, he ended up just creating a character catchphrase for himself, similar to ‘D’OH’ or ‘”Yabba Dabba Doo!”
As you may have read in this post – for his 60th my brothers and I got the slogan carved into gold plaques and hid them in his favourite London pubs; The Dog and Duck, The Wheatsheaf, and The Toucan.
I went to meet Dad one Friday afternoon. There are expectations for meeting my father during the week; it will always be in Soho. The exact location will be established half an hour before the agreed meeting time. The location will always be a pub; this time, it was The Black Horse on Rathbone Place.
Generally, someone from the advertising industry will be with him. Today, it was a man named Aidan. They ordered a round, and we spoke about recording sleep patterns, cigar rooms, and how Soho is one of the best places on earth.
We got another round in and spoke about how the United Kingdom has never been that united, and then Aidan left, and Dad and I moved on. This is another expectation when meeting Dad, you will be joining a crawl without a destination in sight. Some call it being Eric-d; I call it hopping onto the Eric Express.
We marched through Soho Square and got to the Toucan Bar, where men in chinos stood outside with their Friday pints glowing gold in the sun.
“Let’s see if the plaque is there!” Dad said and pivoted into the pub before I could object.
The plaque was, surprisingly, still there, stuck to the right-hand side of the bar. Dad wanted a photo of him with it, but there was an obstacle in the way; a man on a stool who was having quiet drink alone.
“Mate, could you move a second?” Dad said. The man, tall, tanned, with deep eyes, was clearly not a local and seemed baffled that this bright-shirted bloke was disturbing his peace.
“You want me to…move?” he replied in broken in English.
“For a second, mate, yeah please.”
The man sighed loudly, slowly and carefully turned on his stool, feebly reached behind him, and picked up a pair of crutches. The woman standing next to me cringed visibly. And at that moment I wanted to run out of the pub, out of Soho, and jump into the Thames.
“Oh, sorry!” Dad said, now sheepishly, “Didn’t realise you had no legs!”
“I got legs, they are just broken,” the man said and hobbled off the stool and shuffled a few inches away.
Dad turned to me. “….Ready?” he said, and got into position next to the sign.
I could feel the pub’s eyes on me as I took the photo of my dad, leaning next to his plaque, with his slogan, awareness, as the man with broken legs patiently waited for us, so he could sit back down.
“Top bloke!” Dad said when it was done, he insisted on buying him a pint. Things were looking up until Dad asked the man if he was from Denmark, and the man said he was from Brazil….at that point, we became aware that we probably should just go.
As we left The Toucan Dad couldn’t stop chuckling
– I could only assume that Mike Dillion gave him the same advice once.
THE QUACK 