Dermot: Things I've noticed on his birthday. With thanks to Rob.

This is all my brother Rob's fault. It really is. Not the heart attack, not the years of frustration and pseudo-control freakery as you don your tinfoil hat and say goodbye to someone you know and watch their memory float off, like a balloon, into the public ether to be guided off course by the winds of public memory. What's Rob's fault is his posting of a picture with a familiar face smiling as only he could, though never in public. Not until today. And that went viral, on the old man's 63rd birthday.

So here are some things I've noticed from trawling though the Internet as I punctuate the day's work.

1. Outage is not a word. I don't know what they experienced in Turkey today, but it wasn't that. More evidence of the Irish Times' descent into madness and decadence.
2. Estranged was a word ascribed to my parents. They were separated, and they were strange (both living and dead - no mean feat), but they were great friends. Also no mean feat.
3. Wikipedia is still shite. My father's birthday was indeed today, and scrolling down some comments, one person confirmed the birthday was wrong, as they had checked it on Wikipedia. This, despite the fact that the man's middle son had posted a picture on the correct date. Its power to persuade despite every iota of reason contradicting it is indeed frightening.
4. 63 is still younger than Kenneth Williams when he died. For that matter, it's still young.

The other is that despite officials Ireland's amnesia of my father in public discourse (I notice Bernice Harrison in the Irish Times, historically a paper which could be quite ambivalent towards him, praising the excellent Irish Pictorial Weekly as if their edge were unseen in the annals of Irish broadcasting; this, despite work like Scrap Saturday similarly causing ructions among RTE defamation lawyers.), two inalienable facts remain:

That death is relative, and he is still held in great affection.  He has, in the oddest, most post-modern way, never, thankfully, gone away. Struck down, he became more powerful than any of us could have imagined.

The power of affection can be a deeply humbling experience.

Thanks Rob. Happy birthday Pops.