Sounds normal and well-adjusted for a young lad.
If he’s still at it when he’s 49 you may need to have a word…
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Sorry for your loss Richie.
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Bad fathers create good fathers.
My grandfather was an alcoholic who died younger than I am now by choking on his own vomit in a police station. Despite all this my dad says he never hated or resented him for it and when he was sober was a good dad. My mum told me that my dad said for all the bad things his dad did he hoped that he had learned from them to be a better dad to us.
My old man is the same and will always say for anything good I did there was something wrong or I could have done it better.
I guess some people find it difficult to give praise or a it’s just their way of spurring us on.
Now all you have to worry about is your son realising what the rest of us already know, you’re a cunt.
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Very sorry to hear your sad news. My heart goes out to you.
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Very sorry to hear of your father’s death Ritchie.
I still remember the phone call after nearly 20 years.
Very best wishes.
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Terrible news - my condolences to you and your family Ritchie.
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Shit Ritchie, sooo sorry for your loss.
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Thank you everyone for your kind comments, they are really helpful. I was kind of worried about the attention whoring nature of my post but you guys have come up trumps. Who’d have thought I’d meet such a fine bunch of blokes on teh interwebs?
Ok, you should all get back to being massive cunts now, before your reputations are shot. 
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Just seen this thread and can only offer what’s been said above - my condolences. It’s over 5 years now since my dad died and he sounded pretty similar to a lot of the above. I guess a lot of us are around the same age (give-or-take a few years) and it seems to be a recurring pattern with dads / granddads that grew up pre and post war that they behaved in a certain way (stiff upper lip and all that) that they found it hard to heap any kind of praise on their children. We can only hope that we don’t repeat the same errors (if that’s what they were) ourselves.
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I am never sure whether they were errors or not. The way he brought us up just IS. He wasn’t very good at displaying emotion except for regularly taking the lid off his seemingly bottomless pit of anger. On the other hand he demonstrated a commitment to our family in his way which was highly admirable. He stood by my mum and her mental illness and as I have said upthread, his work ethic had to be seen to be believed.
He passed quite a few things down to me. For instance, we have a larder full of tinned food just in case Jerry launches a doodle bug attack on South Kent. 
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Sounded like a great guy, my deepest condolences…
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Errors was the wrong word - I just couldn’t think of a better one. And yes, you are right (I think) in saying that’s just the way things were then. It was a tough time for all and some handled it better than others, just as we do now and always will do. We can only hope that we all live and learn and in some small way try to love our own children in a more positive, constructive way.
Brother, I know that feel… Boy, do I… Sadly I inherited a portion of it, as did my brother, but then our mother is also Supreme High Shrew of The Loyal And Ancient Order of Malcontent Psychowitchbitches, so what hope was there…? And that’s no excuse, I know.
Honestly finding your reflections interesting and highly rational. What you say is so true - our fathers’ generation were so ill-equipped in so many ways, trapped as they were culturally between the cast-iron upper-lip of the Victorians they grew-up amongst, and the successively more libertarian generations they dwelt among.
My father always made it clear that being a father and husband was at best a part-time and much-resented occupation, and that I was the daughter he never had… He was always the centre of his own Universe, and couldn’t really relate to people other than as white goods. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to figure out what a broadly normal functionality for a human being is (a partial success…), and never got the chance to close the lid, as when he was admitted to hospital in the terminal stages of his life, my family didn’t think it was necessary to bother me with the news, so I found out when I was invited to his funeral.
Philip Larkin’s perfect poem has been the mantra by which I lived my life, and in the end I don’t regret not starting a family of my own - I would have been shit at it.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
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Bit late with this as its been said many timea already. But nevertheless, Sorry to read this Richie, not good news. Condolences to you and your family.
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Do we think that there was a time before the Victorians where parenting was benevolent, kindly & helpful? Would the Victorians have looked back at their forbears and thought, ‘now those fuckers, they really were strict’. You’d be gazing back into a period where infant mortality was rife & I imagine, child abuse was also commonplace. I doubt there’s ever been a golden era for parenting/child care. Hopefully we’re very slowly getting better at it but at the same time (as evidenced by a couple of discussions on this morning’s tv) we’re still struggling with sex education while access to web porn, sexting etc becomes a significant part of modern childrens’ lives and a whole further level of complexity to navigate.
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Good point well made. I think “Victorian” has become a social metaphor primarily because it was an era when the middle-classes truly arose to significance, and with them a profound swell of moral rigour and emotional repression not seen since their time. Probably also because they still walked amongst us when our generation were kids, so their ways were not confined to history books, but alive in memory and experience.
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Fortunately @Rob998 has that father/daughter conversation mastered should anyone need any assistance.
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Sorry to hear this Ritchie.
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Which reminds me…
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