Going to kill my father

There were mitigating circumstances – you have to trust me on this – for why I set out to bludgeon my father to death in a pub. But the facts of the matter don’t matter now; I went to the wrong pub, and Dad’s still alive.

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You probably think I’m bullshitting you, right? Imagine his reaction when I told him: that I’d planned to snatch at the nearest object, a bottle or ashtray (pubs still had those then), and stove in his skull till he lay unconscious,

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or till someone pulled me off of him. We were in a pub that day, too, talking of our past as though it happened to two other people. And when we parted, later, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d just spent the day with his ghost.