I love this in the context of the film (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but I also relate because I only get to see my dad a couple of times a year. My parents separated when I was 14 and since then I’ve lived with my mum in Scotland, which is a 4 hour drive away from my dad in Yorkshire.

Usually I’d go down in the Winter for a week and spend at least a month with him in the Summer, but it’s been difficult to control since 2007 as he hasn’t been driving up here and I hardly ever had the money to regularly travel down. In 2009 I didn’t see him at all! Last year was the best it’s been for a few years. I spent a week with him in January, a day in March, and a week in July. But during those 2 weeks he was working most days so I ended up not even seeing him all that much. He is also irritatingly difficult to contact on the phone, sometimes descending into erratic patterns and not answering or returning my calls for over a week, so he’s a little unreliable when trying to organise meetings. On average we’ll talk once a week for about 10 minutes but often it kinda just feels like going through the motions. It’s upsetting to not have the luxury of being able to wake up and simply see my dad.

I truly love my dad and have muuuuuuuuuuch more in common with him than my mum and wish more than anything that I wasn’t so isolated from him during my entire teenage years because going so long without constant interaction with him has made it feel like I hardly know him. My mum is a lovely and very caring woman but I have hardly anything in common with her so I rarely have any insightful or deep discussions, whereas now that I’m at the age to appreciate it, I want to converse with my dad as much as possible and learn all about him because from the limited amount of times that we’ve done this, I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed it. I want him to teach me Arabic and Berber and French and Italian and hear about him going to concerts in the 70s and explore his vast record collection and watch arthouse films with him and discuss the works of Albert Camus and just generally learn all about his life, but you can’t do that in 10 minute phone calls once a week at 11:30pm.

He is also a professional chef in Italian restaurants, so I mean THAT’S 9 YEARS BEING DEPRIVED OF SUCH DELICIOUS FOOD.