Ian McMillan: The day I became an accidental role model

I WAS on a bus coming home from Barnsley on a warm midweek afternoon. I was dressed in what I thought was Bohemian Chic but in fact I probably looked like one of those blokes who used to propel canal boats through tunnels with their feet.

A kid on the seat in front was leaning over and looking at me and singing loudly and tunelessly and sucking a lollipop at the same time so he sounded like the latter stages of a second-hand washing machine’s spin cycle.

His headscarved mother shushed him, saying: “That mester doesn’t want disturbing. He’s been working hard down’t pit. One day you’ll be working hard like him and you’ll not want disturbing.” He pulled a final gargoyle face, turned around and contented himself with surreptitiously flicking bits of rolled up bus ticket at an oblivious nun.

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Somehow, by just sitting on a bus in my less-than-trendy garb many years ago, I’d become that most shaky of things, A Role Model. The fact that I’ve never worked down the pit didn’t matter. To that lady on that bus I was something for her son to aspire to, something to look up to.

I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of being a role model uncomfortable; on the other hand, if you’re middle-aged and vaguely respectable then maybe it’s inevitable that at some point you’ll be held up as a role model.

It’s the idea of being held up that I find uncomfortable. It was connotations of public hanging or, worse, bungee jumping. If you’re a role model then everybody is expecting you to come off your rope and hurt yourself, and it’s just the same with bungee-jumping.

I was thinking about my role models the other day, the people who have shaped me and helped me become the man I am. The fictional ones are easy: Popeye, Tarzan and Hoss. I used to watch endless Popeye cartoons at my Auntie’s house and it seemed to me that he was the perfect human being.

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With one glug of spinach, he would grow muscles bigger than Houghton Main muckstack and biff baddies until they were senseless and dizzy and he and Olive Oyl shared a kiss that was represented by hearts fluttering across the black and white screen like homing pigeons coming back to the shed.

The fact that my Uncle Charlie called the great man “Eye-Pop” in an attempt to ridicule him simply made him greater in my eyes. Later, Tarzan was a role model because he too had big muscles and he wandered around in trunks and swung from a rope and defeated baddies who were driving through the jungle in rattling Land Rovers.

Maybe it was the big muscles I wanted really. Hoss from Bonanza was the ultimate role model, I guess, because he was ordinary. He just wore a big hat and got on with it. He wasn’t as clever as Pa or as handsome as Adam or as mercurial as Joe but he was steady and plodding and got there in the end. He had big muscles as well, of course.

Real-life role models are more difficult to pin down. Sportsmen and celebrities are, like it or not, role models for young people and I believe they should consider that before they do anything reckless or daft.

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Of course, they’ll say that all they want to do is play football or do whatever it is that celebrities do but then they just sound like me all those years ago on that bus. I thought I was just coming home from town; they thought they were just having a couple of drinks after work.

Neither they nor I realised that they were role models. When I was little, my main non-fictional role model was my Dad. He was gentle. He was kind. He went to work every day and looked after us. He must have had big muscles at one time because he’d been a boxer in the Navy. When I became a teenager, of course, I reckoned that my dad wasn’t cool at all but now I know he was. A role model, and a good one as well. Sorry, Dad: I hardly noticed at the time. I’ve only just really worked it out.

I sometimes wonder about that lad on that bus. I wonder what happened when he got home (unless he went to hospital because it turned out the nun was a karate expert and he flicked paper at her once too often). Was I a lasting influence on him? Did the sight of me sitting there in my charity shop get-up make him turn from a life of indolence and begin to work hard at school and pass his exams and go to college and get a good job and meet a nice girl and settle down?

I hope so. After all, that’s what role models are for, isn’t it?

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