Frank Turney

I'm sure I've started more than one of these blog posts with words to this effect, but anyone who knew my Dad knew he liked a drink. Over the course of his life I think he put away enough to fill the Suez Canal. For the last five or 10 years of his life as I watched him get older and his mental faculties hardly withered, I found myself marvelling at how he kept going. I was born in the early 1970s when cigarettes, fast food, alcohol and all the other vices we're plagued with in the Western World had already been identified as being bad for you. I remember being a kid with mild asthma and being terrified of smoking because it seemed like grown ups all did it, which meant I would too one day, and (whether this actually happened or I dreamed it), a doctor said smoking would make asthma worse. I thought if I ever touched a cigarette to my mouth I'd turn around to see the Grim Reaper already standing behind me. I pretended to smoke rolled up newspaper in the backyar