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Wait


“I walked to the bottom of the clothes line this morning, and there your farther was, smoking. I was so upset, I cried. I couldn’t talk to him the rest of the day. He has only just had a heart attack. He tried to talk to me. He said he’d cracked. I just had no words”. Pearl



Strange, it seems that less than one year ago prince laid in a bed surrounded by doctors having narrowly escaped death, and that, only hours later we joked about how shit the hospital food was. But in that moment we had an awakening, well, we being my mother, brother and I. This awakening failed to reach my father, who was devoid of this realisation that maybe he wasn’t immortal after all.

We wait and we wait, and we hope for change. Although people, rarely change. We are who we are, and my father is who he is, and change for him it would seem, might never be an option. However, waiting, or more precisely, making other wait is compulsory or somewhat an inevitable personal trait of his.

Much of my childhood memories involve waiting for his highness to return home, often from the Workingman’s Club, where I believed he worked. My brother and I are still waiting for a giant train-set. And it's not that he didn’t get one, we are just waiting for him to put it together, as it was going to be a complicated set up. It’s only been 27 years, but we live in hope.

My mother, however, has waited more than most. Only thirty years ago my father came through the door declaring that we were all going on a family holiday, and demanded that we packed our bags. We had never been on a holiday before. My father then said he would be back ‘in a bit’, and that we should make sure that we were ready, and then left again. So immediately, my mother ran up the stairs and packed our bags and got us ready. By the time that he returned, we were washed and ready for bed. Those suitcases were packed and ready to go for some time later, but like us, they never got a break.

Only last year, it was all set, Prince was going to get his own passport. I even took his photograph. But we will just have to wait to see how that turns out.




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