Isn’t it odd how little we sometimes know the people we know best?
Yeah, I know, it’s hardly an observation that’ll win me the Nobel Prize for Human Insight. The specific incident that prompted it happened the other day: I wandered into a room where my father was, whistling a merry tune. He looked startled, and said “I didn’t know you could whistle!”
Possibly part of the reaction, if he didn’t think I could whistle, was that he thought there was a whistling stranger in his house. But the point is – he’s known me for 29 years. I’ve been able to whistle for about 20 years of that time. I don’t whistle that much – I tend to hum or sing under my breath instead – but if you’d asked me, I would have said I whistled fairly often. Presumably not. It was an odd moment.