“I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed”

Retired Royal Navy officer Nick Crews sent an email to his three children, and he’s not very impressed with what they’ve managed to achieve in life:

Dear All Three

With last evening’s crop of whinges and tidings of more rotten news for which you seem to treat your mother like a cess-pit, I feel it is time to come off my perch.

It is obvious that none of you has the faintest notion of the bitter disappointment each of you has in your own way dished out to us. We are seeing the miserable death throes of the fourth of your collective marriages at the same time we see the advent of a fifth.

Ouch. But wait, there’s more!

So we witness the introduction to this life of six beautiful children — soon to be seven — none of whose parents have had the maturity and sound judgement to make a reasonable fist at making essential threshold decisions. None of these decisions were made with any pretence to ask for our advice.

In each case we have been expected to acquiesce with mostly hasty, but always in our view, badly judged decisions. None of you has done yourself, or given to us, the basic courtesy to ask us what we think while there was still time finally to think things through. The predictable result has been a decade of deep unhappiness over the fates of our grandchildren. If it wasn’t for them, Mum and I would not be too concerned, as each of you consciously, and with eyes wide open, crashes from one cock-up to the next. It makes us weak that so many of these events are copulation-driven, and then helplessly to see these lovely little people being so woefully let down by you, their parents.

“one cock up to the next”? “copulation-driven”?
No pun intended, right?

Anyway, I’m presenting it here without much comment, as no-one save for the individuals concerned actually know exactly what the circumstances behind it are. But wow – the full text is worth a read. Mr Crews is not happy.

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