Category: Family

I’m still trying to get the Apple piece together into some kind of useful form which of course means that my mind keeps wandering and I keep writing other stuff instead. In a way, I’m quite enjoying it. Somehow it feels easier to write right now than at any time for the last several months. It’s really cathartic.

Well anyway, all of this preamble is kind of just here to stick some kind of frivolous emotional padding around one of the bigger things that is going on in my head at the moment. I hadn’t really decided whether or not I was going to talk about it online – indeed, I’ve only really mentioned it to about three people in the real world so far. And that includes no members of my family. But somehow the time is right and I want to make it slightly more real, so here we go.

Those of you who have been reading this site for a while might be vaguely familiar with the whole biological father narrative that I touch on very very infrequently, but the story in a nutshell is that I haven’t seen him or communicated with him since I was four or five. I’ve written about it more here:

• Here be monsters
• Pictures of my father

So there’s the context… Now, a couple of days ago I was going through some old e-mail and came across a note from someone who mentioned a service you could use to search through the electoral roll. So on the spur of the moment I did a search on the site for my biological father’s name. I came up with about 18 candidates either called “Tom Coates”, or “Thomas J Coates”. And clearly because I was high on Getting Things Done or getting impatient with work or something, I just decided to write all of these potential fathers a letter straight away and send it out. So I wrote a letter that read very bluntly and strangely – like something that an a totally emotionally stunted person might write when his cat died or something. I guess it was pretty matter of fact. It just basically said that I was looking for some kind of limited contact with my father – just to know really whether he was alive or dead and to know some small amount about him – but that I wasn’t sure that I was looking for any kind of emotional committment or ongoing relationship or anything. I asked the recipient of the letter to pass on any information they might have, and – if they were my father – to please send some form of limited response. A few lines in a letter explaining what he was up to now and a photo would do very nicely.

So the thing about sending all these letters out is that I did it on the spur of the moment after almost thirty years and to be honest, each day I go into work I completely forget that I’ve done it. My brain’s always a complete blank – it’s thinking about Amazon or weblogs or home entertainment appliances or what happened on Alias last night. At least it is until someone around me gets some post. Then I start thinking about whether I’ll have got a reply of some kind and what kind of reply it might be. But the rest of the time, the whole thing seems like something someone else did. That’s why I thought I might write about it online. I thought maybe it would make it stick in my head better, make it more real. Maybe it won’t. Who knows.

Since I’ve started the whole palaver, I may as well carry it forward. If anyone out there knows a man called Tom Coates who worked for Honeywell computers in the 1970s who is in his early sixties – or indeed if you are this person – if you could send me even the most limited amount of information you might have that would be really good. I guess at this moment in time, I just want to know for sure whether or not my father is alive. No more than that. That’s about it. Hm.

This whole thing is all very strange and I don’t really know what I think about it. I’m certainly not looking for sympathy and I’m not trying to make a big drama about anything. This isn’t about some epic voyage of personal discovery, it’s about the pragmatics of the future. I’m 32 now. My father is likely to be 63. If I wanted to know something about him in ten years time, then it’s quite conceivable that it would be too late. It might be too late now. And while I don’t really know that the whole issue preys on my mind too much now, maybe it will later.

PS. You always write these things thinking they’re going to be so simple and easy and clean and then you get to the end and what you’ve got is a bloody disorganised mess of words slapped onto a page. I’m keeping the comments closed on this post because on previous occasions in the past I’ve had people gaming them – writing supposed comments from my father that I can’t substantiate. This does nothing but make me feel worse about the whole thing. If you want to contact me directly, the e-mail address remains the same – tom [at] plasticbag [dot] org. If you want to forward the post to anyone who might have worked at Honeywell or ICL, then that would be great. But please – don’t take the piss.

A selection of weird “it’s been in the back of my head for a while now” posts about trying to find my biological father: Looking for Tom Coates (Jan 2002), On searching for ‘father’ (Nov 2001), Ring random people with my father’s name (Sept 2001), Pictures of my father (Jan 2001). This might be the time to acknowledge publically that – in fact – I have been using Google adwords to try and get information about my father, which I know is a bit weird, but hey – it makes my brain hurt a bit when I think about it, so what do you expect? Rational behaviour? If you want to see the Google Ad, then it’s here. Please don’t click on it, as it costs me money and it just goes to one of the pages above.

My position on finding my father has always been a bit vague. I really really didn’t want to talk about it with my mother. I didn’t want to ask her any information or anything. And – of course – this would have made the whole process of finding him nigh-on impossible, assuming that I actually started looking for him seriously, which I never really have. And why? I think the reason I haven’t is because I’m scared – scared of whether he’d like me, scared of whether he’d be appalled of me being gay, scared of whether when I find him he’ll be already in the ground and that then I’ll have only the certainty that I’ll never know either way if he’d be proud or ashamed of me.

This all sounds a bit cheap-airport-novel to me, but no doubt in some way it’s true enough.

So what have I done? In possibly the most half-hearted campaign ever, I’ve looked his name up on a few online directories (his name is the same as mine – go figure), and I’ve sent several dozen e-mails to complete strangers around the world with the same name. I’ve stuck up a Google Ad.

But that’s all the trivial stuff. More importantly I’ve made myself very visible. My father worked in computers for crap’s sake, back when you debugged machine code with ball-point-pens on big stacks of paper with perforated strips down the side punched with holes. If he was still alive today he must have been on the internet at least once, right? He must – sometime in the last ten years or so – have typed his own name into a bloody search engine? Right? And I’ve been here – the most internet-visible “Tom Coates” in the world – owning something like seven of the top-ten “Tom Coates” spots on Google. I’m like a bloody massive flashing beacon of findableness. I’m the fucking atom bomb on a dark night. And has he seen me? Has he arse.

I feel a bit like the SETI Project to be honest. Lighting up the darkness with a seeming infinity of radio waves and broadcasts. Radio, TV, Web, Print… I’m here! Anyone who wanted to could find me a moment! So why don’t they come?

Anyway – now I know more than I ever have before because – dear god – I’ve finally had that conversation with my mother. I now know that the invisible parent was born in August 1940. I know that he went to the same school as Dudley Moore (which I think was Dagenham County High School). This was a surprise – in the back of my head I’d always assumed he was from Norfolk like my mum. This makes me more city-folk industrial by history than I’d expected. Apparently he worked for Honeywell computers and then ‘Digital Computers’ in America for a while. My mother said they chose him because he had a funny brain. And he evidently had a fair share of personal issues with his family. Apparently his mother died and his father remarried. He didn’t like the new woman much it seems…

So what now? I know that you’re supposed to take information like that to St Catherine’s House and that they’re supposed to tell you all about whether he’s alive or dead or not or where he’s living now – or if he’s even in the country (or alive, which I’m beginning to doubt). But while I know what you do with the information cerebrally, emotionally I don’t think I have a clue what to make of the whole thing. Just learning all this stuff was a strange and disconcerting experience – I could feel my brain squirrelling the information out of my conscious mind as quickly as possible, out of sight, out of the way. But I can feel it lurking, like an irritating piece of meat stuck in your back teeth that you keep tonguing but can’t get out. And if you did get it out there would be no certainty that it wouldn’t explode to massive inconceivable size, sprout tooth and scale and claw and take my bloody head off. “You’ve gone way off the map, Sonny,” my mind seems to say in full Geoffrey Rush Pirates of the Caribbean style. “Here be monsters”.

Someone’s been searching for ‘father’ on plasticbag.org using the Atomz powered search box (down the bottom of the page). Now normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but of course since I haven’t seen or heard of my father since I was about four or five – and since he has almost the same name as me – and more to the point since if you search for Tom Coates on Google you end up this as the first search result, I can’t help being slightly weirded out. I don’t really know what you do in these circumstances. What if it was my father, Thomas John Coates wandering around the web. What if he’s been reading this site for months and is too embarrassed to come forward. It’s all very strange…

You know what weirds me out? My father was a computer programmer for ICL in the early 70s. I know that much. So while he’d be over sixty now, if he’s still alive, I doubt that he’s completely computer illiterate. So what are the chances that he’s done a vanity search on the web for his own name? And it’s pretty much identical to mine. So it’s quite likely he’s seen this site. It’s quite likely he’s been here. That’s what gets to me. That he might have been here and still not got in touch.

Addendum: After a conversation with my mother, I suddenly realised that I don’t know whether it was my father or my first step-father (Brian Kelvin) that worked for ICL. I do know that my father was a computer programmer though.

This evening, for … well, I don’t really know why … I decided to ring a few numbers in the London area for people called Thomas John Coates. I rang up four or five, said I was looking for a friend of mine called Tom Coates, but I thought I’d come through to the wrong number, and then asked them their age. I don’t know why I did it really. Felt a bit shaky after ringing a three or four and decided to stop.

A while ago I recounted the story of the day before Christmas Eve, when my mother suddenly presented me with a picture of my father. I hadn’t seen him, or (to my knowledge) a picture of him since I was around four or five. Needless to say this came as a bit of a shock, even though I had mentioned to my mother in passing several months before that I didn’t remember what he looked like.

This feels a bit like cheap melodrama, but it’s probably one of the most important things lingering in my head at the moment, so I should probably share it with the world. Imagine my shock when I realised my father (bottom-right) was a big, baldy, 70s-style beardy-weirdy…

For those who have expressed an interest, I’d just like to reassure you that I will indeed be scanning the picture of my bearded father for popular consumption as soon as I am back in London.

So what will this Christmas be remembered for in my mind? It won’t be the contribution towards the DVD player from my family, it won’t be all my stepfather’s family coming around for Christmas lunch. It will be remembered by me for my mother finding the first photograph of my father that I have ever seen. This is the first time I’ve seen what he looks like since I was about four. And truly he was a beardy-weirdy bloke if ever I saw one. I think I was expecting something slightly … different..