Some years I was rooting around in the cellar at my mum’s house when I found a battered cardboard box full of old film reels. They were films my dad had made in the 60s and 70s. We’d never watched them.
At the time I didn’t pay the films too much attention. I had better things to do than watch old films.
But now? As I approach the middle of middle age, nostalgia is starting to tug at me. And 18 months of sitting around during the pandemic made me realise that actually I don’t have better things to do than watch a box of old films.
So I went back to my mum’s and counted up the films – there were around 50 of them in all. I took a handful home with me.
The film reels. I love my dad’s handwriting
I knew the films were silent 8mm reels but I had no way to view them. I asked around and got lucky – someone on my street WhatsApp group had a vintage 1960s projector she was happy to lend me. (This is perhaps the first time a street WhatsApp group has proved useful for anything.)
I set the projector up on my bed, precariously balanced on a stack of books, and I loaded in a reel of film. I pulled the curtains closed, turned off the light and pushed the button. Magic happened.
The mechanism whirred into life and a misty image appeared on the bedroom wall. I adjusted the focus and there was my mum, in her 20s, chatting to my aunt on a beach in America. After a few minutes my dad appeared; younger than I’d expected but as bald as ever, ambling awkwardly onto screen. It was ridiculous – here were my parents as twentysomethings, striding across my wall, preserved like insects in amber. Some celluloid version of them had been hiding in the cellar all these years.
Brighton in 1970.
I tried recording the projections on my phone but it came out juddery and unwatchable. If I wanted to watch the films properly (and share them with my family) I’d need to get them digitally converted.
So I called my local Snappy Snaps. The good news was that they could indeed convert the films. The bad news was it would cost £40 per reel. Now, much as I wanted to see more of the films, I wasn’t willing to spend £2000 on them. I looked on eBay instead and found a man in Hull who would do it for £3.75 a reel. Take note, Snappy Snaps. Well done, eBay.
I did spend a few anxious moments worried that I had sent a box full of potentially irreplaceable memories to a random bloke in Yorkshire but a couple of days later an email appeared in my inbox with links to the first five films.
More films followed; faded, flickering messages from a disappeared world.
Some of the films were of London, viewed through the eyes of my dad, new to the city and fascinated by the peddlers of Petticoat Lane and the changing of the guard. (He infuriated me by spending ages filming random buildings or buses, before I realised that I do exactly the same.)
London, late 1960s. I think the market is Petticoat Lane.
There were countless films of my parents in America during the year they both lived there; my mum looks stylish, sharp, a London girl in the States. My dad looks like the cat who got the cream, not quite believing his luck. It was bittersweet to see them both so young, and to realise that the story of my family (which now seems so set in stone) was once fresh and unformed.
My dad’s footage of New York in the late 1960s.
There were also a handful of films from Argentina. Black and white scenes of long-gone relatives in Buenos Aires and family holidays in Mar del Plata. One film features my dad’s cousin Gregorio who died in his thirties (I was named after him) looking cool alongside my dad. His children, now middle-aged adults, had never seen any films of him. It must have felt like a miracle.
Mar del Plata, mid 1960s
I don’t know why my dad stopped filming; maybe the camera broke, maybe he ran out of film, maybe he got more interested in living life and less interested in documenting it. I’m grateful he made the films at all. When the final emails from the man in Hull arrived, I felt a pang of sadness: I didn’t want it to end. I wanted to imagine another box of films, and another, and another, an endless supply of footage.
The films mean a lot to me personally, but I also feel like they also deserve a wider audience; they contain some wonderful footage of daily life across three continents.
New York in the late 1960s. My dad helpfully labelled the film ‘Hippies’.
These days we’re all used to the idea of documenting every moment in photos and videos. Millions of hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube every day; I can’t imagine how photos are uploaded to Instagram every hour. So it must seem odd to people born into a digital age that relatively little everyday footage exists of the generations before them. There is no video of my childhood. And I’m not even talking about the distant past – I was at secondary school for five years in the 1990s and there are maybe two photographs documenting that time. There are whole chunks of my pre-Internet life that only exist within my memories. I went on whole holidays without taking photos! I didn’t take a photo of the food I was eating for the entirety of the 80s and 90s! Historians will have no idea what I had for breakfast.
Over the last year I’ve become slightly obsessed with the idea of filling in some of those blanks, of finding all my lost films and photos and fitting together the jigsaw pieces of my pre-digital life. In the last six months I’ve scanned in thousands of slides and photos and loaded up old hard drives in search of photos. I suppose I’m trying to neaten up my timeline. Yes, I am quite boring.
When I think about my dad’s films, sitting for decades in a cellar, hiding in plain sight, it feels faintly miraculous. What I love most of all is the idea that across the world, in backrooms and shoeboxes, there are millions of old film reels and faded photos just waiting to be rediscovered; lost universes waiting to be brought back to life. Go find them all. Bring them back to life.
Sometimes I’m leafing through the second-hand bookshops on Avenida Corrientes or drinking cafe con leche in Las Violetas on Rivadavia. Other times I’m in my dad’s apartment on Sanchez de Loria, on the 7th floor of a brutal grey building, gazing at the sun setting over white concrete.
It is less a daydream than a longing; a yearning for another time and another place. I’ll be shuttling along on the Victoria line on a dismal London morning when my brain conjures the voiceover from an ‘80s Argentine hot dog advert and I drift away, bewitched.
Maybe I’ve reached the age where nostalgia is my drug of choice.
I first visited Buenos Aires in 1987 when I was 12 years old. We were visiting my dad’s family, most of whom I’d never met. We stayed in The Eleven Palace Hotel, a faded colonial-style hotel on the corner of the Plaza Once, a bustling local market full of Jewish pawn shops and backstreet stalls selling wholesale fabric. A dilapidated bus station brought a constant stream of shoppers in from the provinces. The hotel was nothing fancy; a neighbourhood place, chosen because it was a couple of blocks away from my father’s childhood home, where my Grandma still lived with my uncle.
The side streets of the Plaza Once, 1987
I didn’t know what to expect of Buenos Aires, other than knowing that it was the mythical city where my dad had grown up. We’d been on summer holidays to Menorca and Barcelona but this was different. There were no swimming pools or beaches – there were palm trees but there wasn’t a sun lounger in sight. Instead we found ourselves in a vast concrete sprawl of heat, dust, and graffiti.
Buenos Aires was what I thought a real city should look like: skyscrapers and traffic jams and taxis with their radios blaring. It felt alive. And yet so much of the city was also a snapshot of a forgotten time; every cafe waiter was stiffly dressed in black and white, attentively serving like a British butler. The lift in the hotel had an old-style scissor door – you could stop the lift between floors by sliding it open (we did this a lot). On the street outside the hotel the cars were held together by duct tape and optimism. The pavements were broken and there seemed to be real civic commitment to keeping them that way. Haircuts were stuck in the mid ’70s – Rolling Stone mullets for all.
Cars and colectivos, Buenos Aires, 1987
I met the Argentine family I’d only seen in photos. It was unsettling at first. I was a shy middle-class English adolescent raised in the suburbs. Everyone talked. Loudly. All the time. There were jokes I didn’t understand and heated discussions about politics (“Can you please stop arguing?” “What do you mean? We are just talking?!” “You’re shouting.” “This is how we talk!”) It took me a while to adjust to the volume. Nowadays I can appreciate the tactic of winning an argument simply by speaking much louder than your opponent.
Still, I loved that holiday. We discovered submarinos (a bar of chocolate left to dissolve in hot milk) and chewed Chiclets (chewing gum tablets in a distinctive cardboard box) and went to Ugi’s, a bargain basement pizza chain that only did cheese and tomato pizza. We ate sandwiches de miga with the crusts cut off, like a parody of a genteel English tea. We took the subway on Linea A, with its antique wooden carriages and ceramic lighting. We rode in colectivos, the drivers decorating their cabins with every Catholic effigy that would fit on the dashboard. We marvelled that everything we bought, from Coca-Cola to leather shoes had Industria Argentina stamped upon it. My grandma cooked us knishes and my uncle taught us to play poker, gambling for matchsticks.
Mostly, I loved that Buenos Aires belonged to us. Nowadays, it’s another big city on the global route and every half-adventurous traveller with a Lonely Planet guide has stopped off for a few days of steak and tango in San Telmo. But back then it was undiscovered. We didn’t bump into a single English-speaking tourist during that first visit. It was our own private world to escape into. It was our Narnia. It was magic.
That holiday was the last time we stayed in a hotel in Buenos Aires.
By the time of our next visit, my dad had moved back to Argentina and we stayed with him in his new apartment.
Avenida Corrientes, with the Obelisco in the distance, 1987
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I used to say that I was half Argentine. I’m not.
I was born and raised in north London, the son of an English mother and an Argentine father. I grew up in the shadow of Alexandra Palace (I watched it burn down twice. Once, in real time from the school playground, and then later that evening on the news, excited that somewhere so near to us was on television.) I played football and Top Trumps, read The Chronicles of Narnia, Tintin and Asterix and spent the rest of my free time on my ZX Spectrum. Most Fridays we’d do a makeshift Shabbat meal, lighting the candles and saying a prayer, although neither of my parents was religious enough to keep Kosher or observe the Shabbat rules. I enjoyed a comfortable, unremarkable, middle class English childhood. I watched Grange Hill and Neighbours. I certainly wasn’t kicking a makeshift football through the dusty backstreets of Buenos Aires.
The view from our rooftop in north London in the late 1970s
There is a way to be both English and Argentine. There are historic connections between the countries; a wave of English immigrants settled in Argentina in the 19th century and quickly rose to prominence; you see it in place names – areas called Thames and Wilde. Football clubs called Newell’s Old Boys and River Plate. My dad grew up on a street called Virrey Liniers – when it reaches Rivadavia it changes its name to Billinghurst. The connections between England and Argentina still exist in the upper-classes; in the polo and rugby set, who travel from polo matches at the Hurlingham Club in Buenos Aires to drinks in Twickenham. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone posher than upper class Argentines, whose Englishness is preserved by never actually having to live in England. But that version of English and Argentine was never for me. Those people come from a different Argentina to my father, and exist in a different England to me. They scare me.
No. I can’t claim that I’m half Argentine.
We live in an age where identity is our currency. Anyone who has spent time on social media sees how quickly we all learn to leverage our identities; we intuitively understand how to take a small element of our existence and build a personal brand around it. What in my background lends me authenticity? What gives me the moral high ground? What makes me seem less middle class – less privileged? We play up the exotic, interesting aspects of our identity and bury the private school education and a childhood in the suburbs. We are different. We are special. Our views carry real weight. It’s a game I’ve also played, but honestly – what can I do with half Argentine? It doesn’t help me at all. I don’t look Argentine. I can’t pretend to be Latino (all my ancestors were European Jews). I’ve never lived in Argentina. I’m not a citizen. I didn’t grow up listening to Argentine music or eating Argentine food. I speak passable, imperfect Spanish. I’m incredibly proud of my Argentine roots, but what connection do I have that isn’t second-hand? What right do I have to claim a country as my own? I’d feel like an imposter.
If I’m not half Argentine, what am I? The best I can say is that I am more English than anything else. I am English but not completely. I’m incompletely English and incompletely Argentine. Mostly, I’m just incomplete.
I’m also a Londoner, Jewish, middle-class, sexually indecisive and a Spurs fan. Like I said, incomplete.
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I can’t write about Argentina without writing about my dad.
My dad was the funniest person I knew. The jokes were often terrible but he told them with such warmth and mischief that you had to laugh. He was an artist by calling and a shipping clerk to pay the bills. He was short, bald and paunchy (thanks for those genes, dad!). He boasted that he stored soup in his moustache. He had a thick Argentine accent and a set of catchphrases that he’d deploy whenever the conversation lulled: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery!”, “Buy now, pay tomorrow!” “Never a dull moment!”
He was born in Buenos Aires in 1936, the second of four children; two boys and two girls. His mother was either born in Argentina or arrived there when she was a toddler. His father was born in Ukraine, but fled – a combination of antisemitism and the unappetising prospect of being conscription into the Russian army. He spent five years in Romania before getting on a boat to anywhere that took him to Argentina.
I get the impression that my dad had a happy childhood. Where I stayed at home reading and playing computer games, he was out on the streets, skipping classes and playing football in the barrio with his friends; I think he was more comfortable in the company of others than I ever was. Being at ease with people is an underrated life-skill.
He loved Boca Juniors and basketball (like me, he was 5’ 5” and insisted that the sport should be grouped by height, just as boxing is grouped by weight, with lower hoops for short people) but his true passion was art. He drew, painted and did woodcut prints. I don’t think he ever struggled with his art – he certainly struggled commercially, but I think he always felt a pure joy in drawing that never left him. If we went out for dinner his napkins would end up covered in doodles. He couldn’t resist. I’ve always envied him that certainty.
One of my dad’s doodles.
In the early sixties he moved to New York – partly spurred by the desire for adventure, and partly because of the political situation in Argentina. It was there that he met my mum. She was trying her luck in America and ended up working alongside my dad’s sister. Introductions were made. When my mum returned to England my father soon followed. They were married a year later.
I try to imagine what it must have been like for my dad, arriving in England in the late 1960s, having lived in Buenos Aires and New York; I picture it as The Wizard of Oz in reverse; travelling from a world of colour to a world of black and white. I recently unearthed a set of old 8mm films my dad took in the 60s: the films of New York are bathed in colour and movement. The films of London are grey and dismal; everything is steeped in tea and rain.
Buenos Aires is a geometric grid of blocks, a city built upwards not outwards. People live in apartments, not houses, with balconies rather than gardens. Everyone lives (quite literally) on top of each other. And on almost every block there’s a cafe, a panaderia and a kiosko; you can get a coffee and a medialuna without crossing a road. If I picture my dad as a young man in Buenos Aires, he’s making conversation on the stoop or waiting outside a bar or chatting on a corner. Life was lived out on the street.
London is not a grid. It’s a series of villages, flattened out over centuries until they spread into each other; it’s a patchwork of meandering roads, lined with rows of terraced houses where an Englishman can take refuge without having to actually talk to anyone. For my dad the suburbs of north London must have felt like the countryside. He considered it a scandal that he had to walk 10 minutes to a corner shop.
Buenos Aires from above, 2021
London from above, 2021
If my father was missing Argentina I didn’t know it. By the time my sisters and I were going to school my dad had a good job in town, the occasional exhibition of his art and plenty to keep him busy. He painted in the makeshift studio in the cellar, listening to Trevor McDonald on LBC on an old Roberts radio. On Saturday mornings he coached the school football team on the muddy playing fields of Durnsford Road. In hindsight I realise he dealt with his homesickness by pretending Argentina didn’t exist. He didn’t go back to visit and he barely spoke Spanish around the house. He blocked it out and tried to focus on his life in England. It worked, for a while.
It’s difficult to look back at the period through adult eyes, trying to remember how I experienced it as a child. I missed so much because I wasn’t looking for it. I had no reason to think anything was going wrong. He was my sweet, funny dad. Why would that change?
In April 1982 Argentine soldiers landed in the Falklands. Days later Britain and Argentina were at war.
My father’s colleagues at work were supportive, but it must have been hard not to feel unwelcome when the newspaper headlines screamed about ‘Argies’ every day for 10 weeks. He was one of the enemy. Decades later he told me that when he’d phoned his family in Buenos Aires, they insisted that Argentina was winning and that the British were retreating. Of course they did – the military dictatorship controlled the media.
The conflict may not have lasted long, but the damage was done; by the time it ended he wasn’t just on the other side of the world, he was on the other side of the war. I doubt his problems started with The Falklands, but the conflict brought it all to the surface. A seed of unhappiness had been planted, and in the years that followed it blossomed into unbridled misery. Slowly, then quickly, he fell apart.
They were long, unhappy seasons of indecision. I remember them as a pair of curtains, closed. He was desperate to return to Argentina and desperate to stay in London with us. He could not choose. He was neither here nor there. For a long time I think he was nowhere.
And then in 1988 a decision was made. He bought an apartment on the corner of Loria and Moreno, two blocks away from his mother. He moved back to Buenos Aires.
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At first he visited every year and we’d have surreal intermissions of normality.
For three weeks he was back in the family home, smoking thick panatella cigars and leaving a trail of ash around the house. He’d drop me off at the bus stop for school and in the evenings we’d watch snooker and old films. Doug Mountjoy and 12 Angry Men. My most vivid memory of the time is that he made lots of salads and overused the word ‘condiments’. I have to laugh now, thinking about it.
And then he’d return to Buenos Aires. I rationalised his absence by saying that I’d rather have a happy dad on the other side of the world than a broken dad here, but it was a miserable bargain.
We visited him in Argentina the year after he moved back there. I recently rediscovered a set of old photos from the time and there is a grim, gallows humour in comparing our first and second trips to Buenos Aires. In one it’s spring and we’re all smiling, happy to discover this wondrous new city. In the other set it’s winter and we are in the sullen depths of adolescence; surly and resentful of the hand that life has dealt us. No one is smiling. The city looks suitably desolate.
The view from my dad’s apartment, Buenos Aires, winter 1989
It wasn’t all glum; there were advantages to having a dad on the other side of the planet. For two summers running in our mid teens my twin sister and I flew to Buenos Aires to see him. For all the family complications, it was glorious just to escape London for this other world. Arcades had sprung up all along Avenida Corrientes and we spent our afternoons giddily playing Out Run and eating churros filled with dulce de leche and chocolate. We’d play pool at The Richmond, an upmarket cafe on Calle Florida and eat cheap steak at a place on Belgrano that was overrun by flies. I was into comics, and in Argentina I acquired a taste for Fierro, a semi-pornographic anthology that introduced me to the greats of Argentine comics: Solano Lopez, Alberto Breccia, Muñoz and Sampayo. I’d disappear to browse the second hand bookshops on Corrientes, where the comics and graphic novels were piled up alongside cellophane-wrapped porn. It all felt tantalising and transgressive. I still read the comics; I still sense a faint residue of teenage anticipation.
Copies of Fierro. I still have them.
Over time my dad visited London less often. Maybe he thought we didn’t need him as much. There was a blank three year period when we didn’t see him at all. I’d get a letter every six months, always slightly lagging behind me as he fumbled to work out who I was. He’d attach articles about pop stars I’d lost interest in years ago. I was resentful: I’d have preferred no letters to letters that reminded me how little he knew me. It didn’t really matter. By this point I was discovering girls and music and was too busy reinventing myself with a leather jacket to think about him. It’s never easy to know what to do with an absent parent. You don’t get angry at them – you get angry at the people who are left behind. (Someone once asked me how I felt about my dad, and I said: “I forgave him a long time ago, and I will never forgive him.”)
Over in Buenos Aires he was slowly putting his life back together. He taught English and Art. He did his lino cuts. My parents divorced and he remarried an Argentine woman; a sweet, much younger Italian catholic who doted and fussed on him. I liked her a lot.
We both worked hard to repair our relationship. As I got older, I visited Argentina more often. We’d see family or hang out in the centre of town or play pool in a grotty hall in Boedo. He’d show me his artwork and I’d show him my writing. We’d eat pizza and milanesas and empanadas and steak, the four basic food groups of Argentine cuisine. He’d haul me on a tour of the Boca Juniors stadium, even though I’d already been. Sometimes I’d go out drinking in Palermo or San Telmo and I’d stumble in at 4am to find him waiting up for me in the darkness; a bittersweet overcompensation for missing my teenage years.
Me, visiting the only Kosher McDonalds outside of Israel (at the time) in the Abasto Centre in Buenos Aires, 2000.
We’d talk about the past. About the decisions he made. He always told me that he loved me and that he was proud of me. I tried to believe him. We spoke about Argentina. He insisted he wasn’t really Argentine – he was a Porteño. “What do I have in common with a man in the provinces? Or someone from Santa Fe or Tucumán?” It was true. His domain was the 40 blocks from his apartment to the centre of town. The subte from Loria to Perú. Everywhere else was another world. He was a man who made it to New York and London but spent the last 25 years of his life living two blocks from where he grew up. He couldn’t escape home.
Things improved. The Internet made the world smaller. He charmed my friends on Facebook. His artistic fortunes also changed: he had solo exhibitions in Amsterdam and London, and in 2014 he won first prize in the Salón de Artes Plásticas Manuel Belgrano, a prestigious national printmaking competition. I was proud of him.
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On a dismal evening in December 2015 I was hosting a quiz in a bookshop in Wood Green. I was tipsy. The quiz had ended and we were clearing up the debris with friends. My phone rang. It was my uncle in America. He was sobbing. He asked me to sit down.
I sat down.
He told me that there had been an accident. My dad and his wife had been passengers in a car that was hit by a truck. They had both been instantly killed.
My brain kept telling me that it couldn’t be true, that it was ridiculous and unthinkable, while another part of my brain instantly knew it was utterly, irrevocably, undeniably true, as much a fact as my hands or gravity. I felt sick. I howled. Writing these words now, I feel an echo of that horror and panic. It never fully disappears.
My mother and sisters were contacted and it was agreed that I would fly to Buenos Aires the next day. We needed to hurry; Jewish law insists on a quick burial and I didn’t want to miss the funeral. That night I flitted in and out of sleep, unsure what was real. I remember feeling so hot, despite the December weather.
It was a 13 hour flight to Buenos Aires and I’ll be honest, it was wonderful. For 13 blessed hours I was on my own. No one could reach me to ask what had happened or to send their love. There was no noise. No chatter. No one wanted anything of me. I could pretend none of it had happened. I watched forgettable films and the in-flight map; I was a small dot, moving across the oceans. In some ways I wish that flight could have gone on forever; just curled up under a blanket, eating airplane food, neither here nor there but somewhere else entirely, suspended in mid air and suspended in time.
Despite everything, it felt good to be in Buenos Aires. From the depths of an English winter, I suddenly found myself surrounded by the jacaranda trees and the smell of the city in summer. It was a dream. It was impossible to feel grief; there was too much to take in. I suspect it was harder for my family back in London.
It took two days to locate someone who had keys to my father’s apartment. The same apartment he bought back in 1988 on the corner of Loria and Moreno. The apartment we’d stayed in so many times on holiday, with its wood-effect lino flooring and its fridge covered in magnets; with its view of the primary school opposite where the children played in their white school uniform coats; with the balcony on the 7th floor, where my sisters and I launched paper aeroplanes at the traffic below. With all of those things, but now without him.
We went in. The fridge was full of food in tupperware boxes; clothes were laid out on the bed, ironed and folded; a paper note was lying on the table – a reminder for later. Everything left as though they were about to return. There was something illicit and voyeuristic about it; I felt as though we were intruding on their privacy. But someone had to do it. We spent a couple of hours sorting through some of his effects, grabbing items my sisters had asked me to get. I picked up sweaters that smelled of him; one of his beloved baseball caps that made him look like an American tourist; a Boca Juniors polo top. I took an envelope of family photos and a set of his handkerchiefs. I still have them. We tried to make things as right as possible, and then we left. I planned to return when I could.
I never went back.
The view from my dad’s apartment on December 22nd 2015.
Two days later, on a hot, sunny afternoon in a cemetery on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, we buried my dad. I didn’t know how to feel. I still don’t. And then a car took us straight from the cemetery to the airport and I got on a flight to London.
I arrived home on Christmas Day. Feliz Navidad.
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My partner often has to stop me talking to Spanish speakers in public; we’ll be having a perfectly pleasant walk in the park, and she’ll clock that I’ve overheard a couple chatting in Spanish and am lingering near them in the hope of crowbarring my way into the conversation. She’ll give me a look.
I’m getting better at walking away. On the rare occasions I stumble onto an Argentine in public, I can’t help but accost them and start talking to them; I spill out the story of my life in rusty Spanish, never quite sure what I’m hoping for. It rarely ends well: they’re just getting on with their day and I want to engage them in long, nostalgic conversations about a country that they’ve chosen to leave. I suppose I’m yearning for a connection – with my childhood, with my father, with another version of myself I lost along the way. But they can’t take me back to the excitement of 1987. They can’t make me 12 again. All they can do is make polite smalltalk and then run away screaming.
Sometimes I like to imagine an alternative Greg, who grew up in Buenos Aires but whose father lived in London. I imagine summer holidays pacing the streets of Walthamstow or Wood Green, or gazing with wide-eyed wonder at Camden Market or Oxford Street. Which parts of London would I be nostalgic for? Would I have been obsessed with Angus Steakhouses or Our Price Records? Would I yearn for The Trocadero or the jingles on Capital FM? Would I romanticise double decker buses and The Piccadilly line? Would I dream of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and PG Tips? I know it’s all ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than my second-hand nostalgia for Buenos Aires.
For lots of us, there’s a moment. A point in late adolescence when the world magically opens up; when you’ve escaped the tyranny of school but don’t yet have the responsibilities of adulthood. It’s a moment when you feel on the verge of great discoveries: sex and music and drugs and books and ideas. You know you are on the cusp of something special; it feels like just below the surface, all life’s secrets lie shimmering, waiting for you to dive in and find them. Great glories will be revealed.
And then life happens. And most of the time it’s fine, and some of the time it’s wonderful, but it never quite matches that moment when you’re sixteen, ripe with potential, when every sunset blazes with meaning. I suspect a lot of people spend the rest of their lives in the shadow of that moment, never quite embracing the present, never quite committing to the here and now, always glancing back over their shoulder to an age when anything felt possible. It’s a trap, but it’s a very seductive one; it worms its way into you. It whispers all the things you want to hear. For me, Buenos Aires is that trap. There is a mythical Greg in Buenos Aires who still lives in the technicolor moment of a 16-year-old.
I’m aware that my vision of Buenos Aires is a mirage. I’ve spent enough time there to know of the endemic corruption, the economic instability, the poverty, the squalor, the endless bureaucracy, the constant strikes and the perennially disappointing coffee. Every time I visited the overflow of crime and rubbish from the Plaza Once crept nearer and nearer to my dad’s apartment. I know that in real life it’s a city like any other, full of joys and disappointments. It’s not Narnia – it’s just somewhere else. Another place.
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It’s now five years since my father died and I’m a father myself. My life now is pacing around Walthamstow, walking my daughter to school, interminable afternoons in the park, an occasional commute into the office and even rarer trips to the pub. Argentina may as well be the moon. And yet Buenos Aires has worked its way under my skin; it seeps into my dreams. I can’t resist it. I find myself on Google Streetview, retracing journeys I made decades ago, I watch videos of bike rides around the city on YouTube. I scroll through photos of Nueve de Julio on Instagram. There is a vintage map of Buenos Aires on my bathroom wall and I stare at it endlessly; at the road where he lived; at the street where he died.
Buenos Aires is the ghost that haunts me.
There is a video of my dad in the house he grew up in. He’s giving a little guided tour, chatting to the camera in Spanish. His artwork is hanging on the walls and in the background the radio is tuned to Radio Dos Por Cuatro, playing non-stop tango. It makes my heart sing. It destroys me.
The passageway at the house where my dad grew up, which he later turned into his studio.
Argentina gave me my father and took him away from me. It was the country he loved and the country he chose over us. No, I am not half Argentine, but it was my father’s country and some part of it lives within me. I cannot escape that. I will return.
My dad was always more of a football fan than me; it came naturally to him – it was in his blood. He grew up playing on the streets of Buenos Aires and throughout his teens and twenties he and his brother Cacho would go to la Bombonera to watch Boca Juniors in every home game.
A Boca lino print by my dad.
When he met my mum and moved to London he married into a family of Spurs fans. He kept alive his links to Argentine football by helping Spurs new-boys Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa settle in London (a story I will save for another day). Even after his marriage to my mum ended and he moved back to Buenos Aires, he would drag us on tours of La Bombonera every time we visited him. Often when I called him from London on a Sunday evening, he’d be listening to a Boca match on the radio.
My dad in the centre, with Spurs manager Keith Burkinshaw on the right. Spurs had just signed Ardiles and Villa and my dad offered to help them settle in London.
Football didn’t come as naturally for me. I loved playing in the school playground and on a Saturday morning with school, but as a kid I never went to matches and I wasn’t bothered about club football; I never had that romantic scene of father and son cheering together on the terraces – I was too shy and too middle-class; I was happier tucked up in bed with a stack of comics. It was only when I started university life in Leeds in the mid 90s that I started following Spurs on a weekly basis. I began to realise that football was a way to make new friends and pad out flagging smalltalk – the cliché of football as a universal language is true.
And then over time, week after week, Spurs got under my skin. Managers came and went, we flirted with relegation and consistently underachieved. Bad results would ruin my weekends; last minute winners would have me swearing at the telly. And every so often we’d sign a Ginola or a Berbatov or a Bale and we’d behold… magic. (I should also point out that in 2003 I applied to be Spurs manager. I still have the rejection letter).
I did not get the job.
My dad was back in Buenos Aires and I was in London. For much of the last 20 years, before Facebook and Skype erased the distance, our relationship was restricted to a letter every few months, but football remained a small, tentative island of common ground. Over the years we rebuilt our relationship, and football was part of that. I remember talking excitedly to him when Spurs appointed Pochettino as manager; there was something so right about my club bringing in an Argentine, as though the stars were working for me and my dad. And Poch was great: warm, handsome, suave, clever and a brilliant manager. He made Spurs unSpursy. At least for a while.
And then in December 2015 my dad died. It was a sudden, violent death, and in that moment of trauma, everything in my life was smashed together. And in the weeks and months that followed, his death became fused with the fortunes of Spurs and Pochettino. It wasn’t quite as simple as me transferring my affections from one Argentine man to another, but it was hard not to cling onto Poch as I flailed around.
It was good timing: in the season after my dad died, Spurs threatened to win the title for the first time in 50-odd years (well, we never really looked like winning, but it was exciting to be leading the chasing pack) and when we finally blew it in the 2-2 draw with Chelsea I felt unexpectedly emotional. I hadn’t realised how much I wanted them to win it for my dad. But next season Spurs didn’t collapse. We just got better and better, and to my pleasure we added more Argentines to the squad. Here was the team that my dad and I supported (and my mum, bless her, who embodies the natural pessimism of the lifelong Spurs fan), full of Argentine players, playing magnificent football and tearing up the league. We didn’t actually win anything, but we were qualifying for the Champions League year after year and playing thrilling attacking football. We made it all the way to the Champions League final, but it wasn’t to be.
And then two days ago Pochettino was sacked. The team hadn’t played well for nearly a year, and Poch had looked irritable and distracted for some time but I was still gutted. It was the end of an era that felt like it had only just begun. And that’s a lesson life teaches you, I suppose: that the story doesn’t always work out the way it should. That you don’t always get the ending you deserve. My dad didn’t.
Spurs already have a new manager, and all eyes are on the next game. But right now, this feels less about football and more about a certain sadness. Another connection with the past is gone, and all those memories feel a little more distant.
The last couple of days I’ve been “getting in touch” with my Argentine roots. On Friday evening I went to an nice event/talk about Argentine comics and then on Saturday I went to a bar where 200-300 Argentines watched the national team getting trounced 4-0 by Germany in the World Cup quarter-finals. That was fairly disastrous. Still, I got to practise my Spanish and pretend I knew the chants everyone else was singing.
My dad is from Argentina. Born in Buenos Aires, he lived in London between 1969 and 1989, when he moved back to the city of his childhood. He visits Europe when he can.
I was born in London, England. I am English. Growing up, we didn’t speak Spanish at home, except for a couple of words. I remember feeling very English throughout my childhood, even if my name is Gregorio and my father is Juan Carlos. Nowadays I speak pretty fluent Spanish, but that’s thanks to years at university and recent trips to Argentina. My Spanish accent is still a mess of English, Argentine and Castillian Spanish (and American, according to one person).
When we were little kids it was too expensive (and probably too painful for my father) to visit Buenos Aires. I made my first trip there with my parents and sisters, when I was about 12 and from then on I visisted there every 2-3 years to visit my father and see family. There was a period between 1993 and 2000 when I avoided going. I’m not quite sure why. I’ll ask a shrink.
I call myself half-Argentine, but the reality is that I don’t know Argentina, I only know Buenos Aires and of that, mainly the barrio around my father’s place and microcentro. When I am in Buenos Aires I am there to see my father, not be a tourist. There are friends who spend 2 months doing the whole of South America who have seen more of Argentina than I have in my countless visits. They know Cordoba and Mendoza and Iguacu and Bariloche. I know the Linea A subway line. As a teenager my Buenos Aires was wandering the streets of Corrientes and Callao in my leather jacket, smoking cheap cigarettes and hunting through the book and magazine stores for comics and pornography. I loved it.
When I was young, Argentina was an impossibly distant, exotic place. There were few Argentines in London. There was no internet, so contact with my father was limited to occasional letters and phone calls. No-one went on holiday to Argentina. And I liked it like that. Buenos Aires was my playground. It was my Narnia. My secret world.
Now things have changed. I know countless friends who have visited Buenos Aires. It’s a staple part of the middle-class-traveller-seeing-the-world route. I know English people who have fallen in love in Buenos Aires and stayed here. And since the economic crisis of 2001, there are an increasing number of Argentines in London (as evidenced in the bar for the World Cup match). The barriers between England and Argentina have crumbled. I should be happy, but I’m not. It’s like the gates of Narnia have been flung open, and what was once my secret refuge (my secret identity) is now just another place in the world. The world is getting smaller.
Sometimes I’ll be chatting to a stranger and I’ll mention that my dad is Argentine and they’ll say: “Oh, I’ve been to Buenos Aires. It’s amazing, isn’t it?” and I’ll nod and agree, but part of me – a selfish part of me, admittedly – resents them walking through the streets that were once mine alone.
With England now out of the World Cup, I can breathe a sigh of relief and blog about football.
The shocking thing about England wasn’t their humiliation against Germany; it wasn’t even the poor performances. It was the deluded expectation that we would win it. I consider myself a fairly measured, cautious kind of fellow, so I wasn’t expecting too much, but the press (and massive corporate sponsors) get people worked up with their “THIS IS OUR YEAR” bullshit.
Let me be clear: England don’t have a terrible team. We have an ok team. We did better than Italy. We did better than France. And games turn on tiny things – we were woeful against Germany but had Lampard’s goal been given, who knows what might have been. That’s not to gloss over the fact that we were crap, merely to point our the possibilities that always exist in a game as frantic as football.
There’s a kind of collective hysteria in England about our football team. Every four years the usual suspects (Hansen, Shearer, Venables, Redknapp) trot out the same lines about how we’ve got world-class players and how there’s 5 or 6 teams who could win the World Cup and how England are one of them. And this hysteria totally and utterly contradicts the overwhelming body of evidence that shows that England aren’t very good at international football.
Let’s take a look at how England have historically done in World Cups:
Our first World Cup was in 1950. We got knocked out in the first round. In 1954 we got to the quarter-finals. In 1958 we got knocked out in the first round. In 1962 we got to the quarter-finals. In 1966, playing at home, we won the World Cup! Hooray! In 1970 we made it to the quarter-finals. In 1974 and 1978 we didn’t qualify for the World Cup. In 1982 we made it to the 2nd round. In 1986 we made it to the quarter-finals. In 1990 we made it to the semi-finals. In 1994 we didn’t qualify. In 1998 we made it to the last 16. In 2002 and 2006 we made it to the quarter-finals and in 2010 we made it to the last 16.
Show those statistics to a neutral (I don’t know. Someone from India or Belize) and they’d think: “Oh, so England have an ok team. They consistently qualify for the World Cup and then they mostly make it out of the group stages, but they rarely get to the latter stages of the competiton.”
And they would be right. In the 44 years since we won the World Cup, we’ve managed to get to one semi-final. Other teams to have made at least one semi-final appearance since 1966 include those footballing titans South Korea, Turkey, Croatia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Belgium and Poland. In other words, plenty of other teams have matched England’s acheivements.
In contrast, if you look at teams like Italy, France, Brazil, Germany and Argentina, these teams have, over the last 30 years, fairly regularly gotten to the latter stages of the World Cup. Since England won the trophy in 1966, Brazil have won it 3 times. Germany, Argentina and Italy have all won it twice.
In domestic terms, England are probably about the same as a team like Aston Villa in the FA Cup. We can expect to beat a few of the lower teams and on our day, none of the big teams will relish playing against us, but very few people would put money on us actually winning the competition. But with Aston Villa, I’d imagine that the fans are more realistic about their chances: they probably don’t believe they’ve got the best team in the competition, or that they are likely to win. They know that the likes of Chelsea, Man Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal and others all have better squads and a better track record. So they do their best but don’t get massive delusions of grandeur.
None of this is to say that England are shit; we’re not. We’re quite a good team – in the top 20 or so teams in the world. But that’s it. Of course we have some very good players, but so do most teams. The difference being that most foreign players aren’t as incredibly overhyped as the England superstars. Is Wayne Rooney a good player? Yes, he is. But aside from a good showing at Euro 2004, he has done nothing for England on a big stage. Compare him to someone like Germany’s Miroslave Klose, who hardly gets a mention as a “world-class” player, but consistently scores hatfuls of goals in World Cups and European championships. The idiot pundits on the BBC were saying that only one or two of the German players would get into the England side. Yes. The German team who got to the final of the last European championship, the semi-final of the last World Cup and the final of the World Cup before it – they’re not as good as the plucky English players who failed to even qualify for the last European championship. It’s an astonishing level of delusion.
Part of the hysteria stems from the mistaken assumption that playing well in the Premier League (or the Spanish La Liga or Serie A) is a guarantee of international success. In commercial terms, the Premier League is a massive success, but everyone involved has started to believe their own hype. The media bias towards the Premier League and the Champions League has become unstoppable. The commentators on many games seem to be unaware that football exists beyond Europe – that players from Chile, Algeria, Japan, Korea, Mexico and Paraguay can trap and control a football despite never having played in The Champions League. It was pitiful watching an Algerian team of anonymous journeymen with better technical skills than the English players. Just because Glen Johnson earns 50 grand a week, it doesn’t make him a world-class player.
I suppose that’s really what sickens me: the money and the hype. The Nike adverts, the Umbro adverts, the beer adverts, the patriotic crap in the tabloids. It’s the blind assumption that because we’ve thrown billions of pounds at a group of overhyped players, they are world-beaters. Being the best paid team in the world doesn’t make you the best team in the world. Don’t believe the hype.
Maradona has been confirmed as the new Argentina coach. Oh dear. It’s a bit like the FA announcing that Gazza is to be the new England boss. It will end in tears. He’s not a manager, he’s a circus.
The Sunday before last I was sitting in front of the PC, idly wasting my life, when I got a text message:
“Your dad’s artwork is on the Antiques Roadshow”
I had to read it twice before it sunk in. I rushed across the room and excitedly turned on the telly. The Antiques Roadshow expert was standing next to a nice young couple. Behind them were a number of works of art including, remarkably, two of my dad’s paintings from the 70s. It was very bizarre. I looked at my telly: my dad’s paintings. I looked at the wall opposite my telly: my dad’s paintings.
I phoned my mum. I phoned my sister. I told everyone. Then I waited for the show to be available on Iplayer and downloaded it. There it was in all its technicolor glory.
The backstory: Some fellow was working as an electrician in London, gutting someone’s flat. The owner was chucking out a load of paintings and prints, so the electrician rescued them. The artwork sat about for a while before the electrician’s girlfriend persuaded him to take them onto the Roadshow. And among the artwork – all from Argentina – were two of my dad’s pictures.
The ‘expert’ appraising the artwork was a bit of a knob. He mispronounced my dad’s name, and theorised that the works had been done by some kind of Argentine artistic commune – which sounded terribly exotic, but the truth was that my dad was living and painting in Dollis Hill, north London, when he completed the paintings in question. Still, it was quite thrilling to hear a man in a bow-tie talking about my dad. My dad! When I managed to tell my dad about it, he was less excited than I was, which I understand. When family members spotted stuff about my book/website in the press, they were always more thrilled than I was.
The expert then said that properly framed and promoted, my dad’s paintings would fetch between £1200 and £1500. If only that were true.
The following Monday I phoned up the Antiques Roadshow and corrected some of the incorrect information, and passed my email address onto the couple who found the paintings. Maybe they’ll get in contact. I hope so.
My dad lived in London from about 1969 to 1989, when he moved back to Buenos Aires, the city of his birth. During his time here, he worked in import and export (mainly antiques) and painted and did lino-cuts in his spare time. He had quite a few exhibitions, but was never really keen on lots of self-promotion. He sold work – never a lot, but regularly enough. All fathers are heroes, and despite his many flaws, my dad is a big hero of mine. And it was very moving to see his artwork on primetime TV, watched by millions. Well done dad.
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