I've just finished watching Kill Bill - Vol 2, which was showing on the tv tonight, for perhaps the fifth time. Each time the emotion, the energy, the action and the whole genre get me going, but also each time I cannot help but remember a time in my past when I was growing up.
My former step father ( deceased for over a decade ) and I shared very few happy moments together. He was not what I considered a good person, a good replacement father figure or someone that took a lot of attention on his step children.
He knew that we all us six children disliked him, for one reason or another, but it was the prolonged unemployment following to the closure of Chatham dockyard that I believe was his ultimate undoing.
Now it is not like me to speak ill of the dead, and here I will try to not make an exception. In fact, following watching Kill Bill, it brings back perhaps two of the only good moments we really did share together.
The first was the name "Masamune".
Although my step-father rarely displayed an active role in my childhood interests, he did seem to know that I likes swords and the samurai. I have no idea if it was a coincidence, but just as I got my first computer, an Acorn Electron, he watched a tv documentary on the subject of sword makers and then told me to always remember the name Masamune, as he was attributed to be the finest sword maker in all of history.
Not having any spare paper or books at hand, I grabbed a pencil and wrote on the grey keyboard the name above a row of keys. Later he asked me what had I done with the name, and I told him that I had wrote it on my keyboard. He mistook my very literal meaning and thought that I had quickly programmed it in somehow and that I could get the computer to search of come up with the answer if ever I asked it. Not wanting to disprove his theory, I let him believe this.
The second is that of me being tied up in knots.
Coming from a naval background, much like any other sailor my step father was exceedingly good with rope and knots. With my own youthful passion for magic and escapology I actually asked him on many occasions to try and tie me up, so that I may attempt to wriggle out and free myself from the bonds.
As I was aged about nine or ten at the time, I doubt now that he made a serious attempt to tie me as well as he could have, and was indeed only doing it so that I could feel like I was escaping. It must have amused him inwardly to see me wriggle on the ground and think that I was better at escaping that he was at rope knots all the while knowing that he wasn't actually trying to prevent me at all.
I can't remember now why I stopped asking to be tied up so that I could practice my escapes, but I suspect that it was after we had another one of our falling outs and thus I went into one of my many strops and gave everything the silent treatment.
However now with I think back on it, this is perhaps yet another link in the chain of me wanting a adventurous lifestyle, one where the bad guys tie you up and then I escape and battle my way to freedom.
On reflection, maybe I am not nuts as such, just forever living half in a dreamworld from which I prefer to live than the one I inhabit most days.
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