The Alan W Memorial Tour

My father died last year.  It has been...... quite a thing, as I guess it is for everyone when they lose a parent.  My situation is made somewhat more complicated for lots of reasons though, being that I lived on the other side of the planet from him for some seventeen and a half years before he died, and that he was actually my adoptive father.  He was my mother’s second husband and adopted me at the same time that they got married.  I had zero contact with my biological father from the ages of about two through sixteen, so when I talk about fathers and dads I definitely mean my adoptive father, being that he was the man that brought me up.  He’s also the only man I would dream of calling “Dad”.  It’s complicated, and I might get into some of the whys and wherefores of all of that over the next few weeks; we’ll see.  In the interim, go and watch Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise.  It’ll help provide context.  

Dad died at the tail-end of a tour I had in Australia, just before I was about to head into a really hectic period singing in an opera in Cologne.  After the opera finished, things got very complicated with legal stuff, and then Covid hit.  There has been..... a lot on the table since he left us, much of it related to him and much of it not.  As many of us have  (I guess), I’ve been putting out a lot of fires lately, and I’ve wanted to spend some time on my own thinking about him, listening to his music, trying to come to grips with his legacy (financial and otherwise) and what sort of a man I want to be moving forward in his absence.  My life is going to change hugely in the next few months, I’m not allowed to work anyway, and it seemed to me to be a a good time to spend some time alone, go on a long-ish journey, and think.  The subsequent posts will be the results of that.