There are four ways of approaching father’s day: as a son, a father, as oneself and with the whole thing as a load of commercial cobblers.
As a son my thoughts naturally turn to my eighty year old dad in the Isle of Man. I’ll give him a bell later this morning. We’ll have a chat about nothing. Had I been at home we might have gone out for a few holes of golf except that at the ripe old age of eighty he now only plays during the week at an appropriately leisurely pace. I speak to him most days in any case.
At eighty he soldiers on. I am his IT support and was yesterday woefully lacking as I wasn’t able to replicate his Google+ scenario for troubleshooting on my own iPad. He has an iPad 2 and mine is an original. In fact I couldn’t get the Google+ App to work on my own iPad! It’s all a load of codswallop.
When I go and visit we normally pop around to the Whitehouse pub for a couple of pints before dinner. They have a lovely little snug there with a coal fire which is often on even in the summer. It’s only a hundred yards or so from our house. Not bad I say. When we get home dinner will be ready. Perfect.
As a father I don’t really expect much from the kids. It’s all a load of commercially invented tosh anyway (see point 4). No card, barely a half remembered acknowledgement that it is father’s day. In fact the kids and I only realised that it was father’s day when we saw something on a TV ad about it last night.
So no cup of tea in bed this morning from adoring and reverential smiling faces. They are all still snoring away having stayed up late to watch England lose to Italy in their World Cup opener. I won’t see them until mid morning. Will cook my own bacon.
There may be a phone call from the two older ones who are not at home. Tom will actually call with his mobile. Hannah will expect me to be on Facebook this evening at which point we will just arrange to move to a Google Hangout. We don’t start on Google. Shows that Google+ still has a way to go to become the social network of choice for that demographic.
When I think of it I rarely engage with anyone on Google+. Just use Hangouts via the gmail interface or the Hangouts app on my droid.
At least we will have a barbecue this evening with the two kids remaining at home. Just the three of us. Anne is away seeing her own dad. On this basis we get to choose what we do foodwise anyway. I bought some chicken to make a chicken salad last night. Ended up getting a Dominos pizza delivered before the England game. BBQ chicken it is tonight then. I have a nice bottle of red and we may just stroll to the cricket club before hand for a relaxing cold beer whilst watching a bit of leather on willow.
The approach to father’s day as an individual may be considered to be the equivalent to what one does on one’s birthday. In other words do what you like, within reason. Today I will be cooking a bit of breakfast – not too heavy as I want to go to the gym later. After breakfast I have some sorting out to do. The brick workshop which is now just used as a garden store needs tidying up to make room for some shelves from the garage. The shelves from the garage are being moved to allow the new bench to move in.
The bench is waiting for the space to become available before final assembly. It was built to order by a bloke in Suffolk and arrived a couple of weeks ago so needs sorting. Before I can do that I have to clear the garage out and paint the floor. I did consider ecotiles but green garage floor paint makes more sense in our case as sometimes the drain across the front of the garage door blocks with leaves and we get water in. Need to stay on top of that. The upshot is that a painted concrete floor will be more appropriate in our case as it is less likely to be spoiled. That is probably a job for next weekend.
The one other schedule item today is a practice of the musical threesome we have assembled for some friends silver wedding anniversary in August. That’s me on geetar an vocals, Steve on slide and Joe on horn plus any other of the multiple instruments he can play. We did our first gig for the Curle Avenue Diamond Jubilee street party and called ourselves Los Trios Paranoias. Disappointingly I note that there has already been a band of that name so we will have to come up with another unless we call ourselves a tribute band. I doubt we play any of their material – in fact I don’t even know what music they played.
Finally there is of course the approach that all this is total commercial rubbish with no basis of tradition (since 1987!?). This is in fact the view to which I subscribe. Having said that I will still ring my dad, still half expect a call from the kids, still do my own thing today and still expect a cooked breakfast to be served up. Oh no wait. They are still in bed…
Happy Father’s day to all dads out there. Get in that shed!
Another terrific father’s day read:
The header photo is of breakfast at Silva’s – finest greasy spoon in London on Shaftesbury Avenue.
