Something of a Lottery

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

Douglas Adams

This is a post about my father. This is not a emotional post, at least that's the plan. There are points when this post reads like he died - but don't worry - he is still alive and healthy, it's just the events I describe happened quite a while ago.
It is a post about something I didn't appreciate in my father until quite recently; that he gave my sister and me two really great pieces of advice over the years and I didn't notice how good they were at the time. (I hope) this advice has led to my sister and me developing Skeptical mindsets in which we were ready to challenge views of the world as informed by gut-feelings and tradition.


The first was given to me as he drove the two of us into Nottingham (northbound on the A612, to be shockingly precise); in a conversation about the lottery, I was saying something about having seen certain numbers around repeatedly and wanting to bet with those since I must be seeing them for a reason (I was too young to gamble but the lottery seems to hold an inexplicably innocent place in English culture). 
In fact, I even pointed out one of my numbers on a billboard at which point he told me that I was probably seeing these numbers more often because I was looking out for them. That's it. It might not seem like much but it bought a new idea into my consciousness that hadn't been there before. My perception of the world - and presumably, everyone else's - can change as a result of one's own biased perspective. I don't know whether he was aware of ideas like selection and confirmation bias (or whether they are the correct categorisations of my error) however I know this he planted the seeds of these concepts within my mind. I spent much of our shopping trip spotting numbers I hadn't considered "lucky" before then.


The second piece of advice was given to my sister, I don't know precisely where or when because I wasn't there; I wasn't even sure he held this perspective until I had pizza with my sister this evening and she mentioned it. When she was younger, my sister asked my father what "god" was, and why some people thought it was so important; his response "it's like grown up people believing in fairies". Fucking beautiful. Those words resonate deeply with me nowadays, they just scream to be linked with the quote from Douglas Adams at the start of this post.

As I said, I'm not sure when he gave that advice but I'd hazard a guess it was before a particular lunchtime which I was at but have no memory of. This lunchtime occurred when I was in pre-school (making me 4) and my sister was in the adjoining primary school (making her 8); this school was some combination of state-funded and (Christian) religiously-run and therefore we said prayers before our free school dinners.

It is at this moment in the story that I bristle with that mixture of pride and anger that always arises when someone weak and innocent - an 8-year-old girl - confronts someone powerful and cruel - the dinner-ladies and teachers.

My big sister told the dinner-ladies that she didn't want to say a prayer because she didn't believe in god. Evidently, they saw this meek objection with significant outrage; to them it must have been an utter scandal because they stood my sister up and they made her stand in front of all the other children in that large dining hall (plus things were waaay bigger at that age!) and they told the other children that this little girl didn't want to pray because she didn't believe in God. They stood her up there to shame her in public, in front of all her friends, because she didn't believe in fairies like these grown ups (I hope you are bristling too).

The story ends well enough without the need for fairy-intervention; there was no need for fairies because there were enraged parents ready to tear apart a cornered head master; humiliate our child will you?

The idea that attempts at humiliation are the right way to respond to someone with views that differ from your own is ancient and pervasive across all people I have seen or read about; I expect most thinking people would agree that it's not a good way to do things - even if we all do it unthinkingly now-and-again.

So there's two (among many) gifts my father has given us and I think that - after being an almost-constant presence in our lives (despite our parents divorce) with holidays and day-trips and games of footie - I think that they are some of the most valuable.