I often think I’m old, but I am not the oldest man in the world, in fact, I’m pretty low down in the world rankings.
Today I went for a drink with a man who I know for a fact is above me in these very rankings: My dad.
Now, I don’t get on that well with my dad, to cut a long story short, he wans’t around when I was a kid and was a shit dad, trying every six months to recompense it all by going for a drink, too little too late.
I myself sometimes wonder if we can ever be a proper father and son doing father and son things, but I am shit at both cricket and football…so no.
Anyway, it’s time for his six monthly guilt trip so he rang me the other day to say he was going to come down to London, do I fancy a drink? I suppose so.
Today, I didn’t fancy that drink, but he was on his way, and well, maybe this’ll be the time it all gets good.
Within five minutes of sitting down it was obvious this was going to tick all the boxes of a stand Terry and Dad meeting, with one major difference.
It all went smoothly. With me and my Dad, that awkward small talk chit chat that starts a pub conversation before you get warmed up into normal talk never goes away. We can never move on from the same stilted topics and long long pauses. So we start with him aksing how my mum is, my asking how my nan and grandad are. Then it goes on to the cat. Then Formula One, then my job/comedy, then his life. I often wander if I could use that trick from the lumberjack sketch and just put a tape player out with my side of the conversation prerecorded.
He goes of to the toilet.
I get my phone out, time to text. I text my flatmate Dawn, I text her “Jesus, this is a fucking nightmare” and press send and put the phone back in my pocket.
About three seconds later I’m struck with panic, the phone comes out again and I check the sent items.
Oh fuck.
It is at this point that I will state the case for the fact that the blame for what I did does not lie with me, but with Dawn’s parents. They could have called her anything, but chose to call her Dawn, did they not realise that in some 26 years phones would have little screens and the names would be listed aplhabetically? If only they’d have given her a name that didn’t have the same first two letters as the word “Dad”.
I don’t know if he read it, but he was seemingly quite chatty after he came out of the toilets, so it was either the text or some coke.
He might be closer to the oldest man, but he does know how to work a phone. He even rang me to just “see how I was” the next day.
Maybe this worked better than I could have thought.
Thank you, Dawn’s Parents.