When I was in year nine and choosing which subjects to continue with at school, I elected to study for a GCSE in Geography. At the beginning of the 2-year GCSE course, which I suppose must have started in September 1999, we were studying a module on climate and weather. As a part of this, the teacher asked us to pay attention to news about extreme weather events and other natural disasters, and to keep a diary or scrap book about our observations, to discuss them at the end of the GCSE course, two years later.
This was huge for me, as I have always been a project person! Like many little girls, I had mini-projects going all the time when I was a kid, such as carefully organising and reorganising the toy cupboard each Sunday morning, creating a village of shoe box houses for my dolls, and inventing distinct biographies for each of the Hungry Hungry Hippos (true story – I have always been very normal and, yes, I was an only child). Like any good Daughter Dad, my father was my partner-in-crime for a lot of these endeavours.
So when I came home from school that day aged 14 and told him about the extreme weather/natural disaster GCSE project, it became the new big thing that we were working on together. When he read the daily newspaper he would look out for any relevant reports, and hand the paper to me so I could find it, clip it out, and put it in my folder. I would make a note of anything I saw on the TV news or heard on the radio in the morning while he drove me to my friend’s house before school, and I’d check details or place names with him as I did so.
In school, the GCSE Geography course continued, and eventually we started focussing in-class on preparing for the final exam. So naturally I started wondering when we were going to present our project work. We had all spent two full years gathering intel after all, surely everyone was keen to discuss what they had found out! I began to worry that time was running out as there wasn’t much term left before we’d break for the final exams. With a sinking heart I realised that the teacher hadn’t actually referred to the project since that class two years previously when he first announced the assignment. And on deeper reflection, I had to acknowledge that not a one of my classmates had ever mentioned it at all…
Maybe you can guess how this story ends. I plucked up the courage to stay behind after class one day and ask the teacher when we would be presenting our extreme weather/natural disaster projects. Dear reader: he had not the faintest idea what I was talking about.
There are two possible explanations. Maybe the teacher and every other student forgot about the assignment, and I only remembered it for so long because it had become a Daughter Dad project. Or maybe I had hallucinated the entire thing – perhaps the teacher had said in passing that it would be good for us to pay attention to how extreme weather is reported, and my mind warped an offhand comment into an elaborate formal assignment.
Deeply embarrassed, I naturally fled the classroom and never talked to that teacher ever again. The only good thing was that I hadn’t asked the question out loud during class so that everyone would think I had volunteered us all for a huge weird additional assignment right before final exams.
I didn’t always pay a lot of attention in class so misunderstandings like this had happened before, where I had either missed important homework or done something that hadn’t been asked for. But this was on another level, as I had also roped in my ever-patient and ever-enthusiastic father to help me, and we had spent so much time on the work. Awks. Do I regret it? No! It was actually super fun and I think my dad even kept the scrap book we made, for a while at least. Maybe he gave it to someone at work a few years later when their weird kid started thinking about similar things, my memory is a bit hazy. But I know it was the first time I paid attention to climate news, and I know it was fun hanging out with my dad and talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and stuff.
Daughter Dad projects are the best thing in the world and I’m glad we had so many over the years. Like going to the duck park and keeping track of how many different kinds we would see on each visit. Or keeping a nature diary when we went on holiday when I was little, where he would help me with the names of things and give hints on how to draw them. A lot of our projects centred around collecting items related to my most recent obsession. For a few years this meant we spent every beach holiday collecting shells on long walks along the coast – which I now know is not the most eco-conscious hobby, but this was the late-80s/early-90s and we didn’t know not to. Later, I collected tiny animal figurines made of pewter or ceramic (especially the ‘Wade Whimsies‘), so my dad spent his weekends driving 10-year-old me around antiques fairs. Again, I was a very normal child.
Much later, while studying for my PhD in the USA, I mentioned to my dad (who had often visited the US on work trips) that I was trying to collect every state quarter coin. When I was about to fly home at the end of my studies, I was disappointed not to have been able to collect ’em all, and he casually asked me to send him a list of the ones I was missing, so he could look in his drawers to see if he had any lying around from previous visits. When I got home, there was a stack of gleaming quarters waiting for me on the coffee table – every one I needed to complete my collection. He had called in favours from old friends around the US to hunt them down and mail them to him in England. A good Daughter Dad will go that extra mile every single time, even when she grows up and leaves him.
A Few Words... 