Father/Son Bonding in Black and White.

After my second marriage broke up an informal and unacknowledged division of labour developed around summer holidays; my ex-wife would take our three teenaged sons on beach/hotel pool style holidays and I got the hip city-breaks. Though this pattern of vacationing didn’t do a lot for my tan and failed to facilitate my passion for lounging around pools pretending to read books, I loved it.

Thanks to both state-regulated and less offically sanctioned laxities we were able to do stuff in Berlin or Barcelona or Copenhagen that we couldn’t easily do together at home — at least not in public. Like drinking several rounds of weak beers, going to all-night gigs and eating McChicken sandwiches at 5.30am while groups of Russian youths literally kicked each others’ heads in amidst a sea of broken glass outside the ‘restaurant’. Welcome to Sunday morning in the Danish capital, boys.

We did stuff in the daytime too, despite my usually being a good three hours ahead of the lads in getting started. We went to museums, ate frequently, swam in the sea and in urban rivers, drank more weak beer, shopped moderately (these are boys), and generally hung out. Possibly of our favourite diurnal diversion was foraging for vinyl. We’re all music fanatics, with surprisingly convergent tastes, and we love a good crate-dig.

This activity provided insights into the cities and the boys themselves. In Berlin, Felix discovered he could get new-release US hip-hop before it was available in the UK; an undexpected aspect to the powerful and enduring American cultural influence on the place. That evening, having just turned 18 and militantly flourishing his ID, he took his leave from us as we changed U-bahn at the Hauptbahnhof, heading to one of British DJ Benji B’s Deviation nights in a local club. On the same trip he informed me that this was the last family holiday he would ever be going on. A pivotal family moment if ever there was one.

There were moments of bonding too, of coming together across the space of almost two generations (I started my second family at forty), like when we were at the till in a cavernous Copenhagen record store and both Felix and Oscar ran up from different directions clutching copies of the same Soft Machine album, an early 1970s favourite of mine.

My number one moment from all these trips came via our adventures in vinyl, if in a completely unforeseen way.

These three boys — Oscar, Felix and Frank — are mixed-race, the product of an Anglo-Ghanaian union. They are tall, good-looking, with shoulders like coathangers and svelte six-packs. I — contrastingly — am a white guy with silver hair who is frankly well beyond the first flush of middle age. I guess we look odd together; to be honest, I sometimes feel odd when we’re out— like I might be embarrassing them just by the oddness of the conjunction.

On the occasion I’m documenting we were coming to the end of a hard day’s vinyl slog around Copenhagen. It’s probably more accurate to say across Copenhagen, as this type of store tends — for economic as well as social reasons — to be on the outer edges of the urban sprawl, rendering it necessary to schelp back and forth from one extremity to another, engendering both a close familiarity with each urban transportation system and (for me, at least) sore feet.

It’s four-thirty and everything is about to close, so we’re rushing in a cab to the last shop of the day. The boys, as always, are several steps ahead of me and the moment to taxi pulls to a halt, they throw open the doors and bale out melodramatically like Nicholas Cage in a crap action movie and head to the address we’ve gleaned from an online directory. I loved their blind optimism, undimmed after a number of abortive missions due to unpaid retail rents, poor cash flow management, owner disputes, a musical genre going out of fashion, a gentrifying neighbourhood etc etc.

I remained in the back seat of the cab, left behind— for the several thousandth time in my life — to pick up the tab. As I fumbled with unfamiliar notes and coins the driver — middle-aged, smartly-dressed and bearded — eyed me up in the rear-view mirror.

“You on tour then?”

This puzzled me; did we look like tourists?

He caught my quizzical look before I could answer.

“Are you their manager?”

I was even more puzzled now. Yes, they require a certain amount of managing, but that’s not generally how I’d describe myself.

“Are you showing them around?”

Then it dawned on me. He thought they were a band. And that I was their avuncular and no doubt exploitative and avaricious manager taking them for a tour of the city on their day off. Sweetening them up for another lucrative forty-date exhaust-a-thon with records and candy.

This time I replied.

“No, I’m their father.”

“Ah”, he retorted, turning to smile at me with what I only realised afterwards was a subtle and informed wit.

“The Jackson Three.”