19 hours ago
QUENTIN LETTS: Let Dad know you love him (even if he does blow his nose loudly, obsesses about stacking the dishwasher in a certain way, and wears awful holiday shorts)
This Father's Day, if you have given or received a card, what does it depict?
A foaming tankard? A sports car, wheel barrow, tie, rugby ball? Last week I spotted one that simply featured a packet of cigarettes. Another displayed the contents of a toolbox. Good old Dad, always tinkering in his shed with his spanner and saw, fag dangling from his lips and a can of light ale on the worktop.
In this era of policed non-stereotypes, when gender-specific language can land you in the soup, it's amazing the greetings-cards trade still gets away with such things. How come it hasn't been gnawed to a submissive stump by the feminist Fawcett Society and its bristling battalions?
As a 62-year-old Englishman of fogeyish tendencies I am cautious about the more mercantile aspects of Father's Day. Are they not a touch American? Are restaurants' Father's Day menus, like all that shop tat, not a little opportunistic?
Part of me still suspects as much. Yet in a West that has neutered much of its masculine culture I also see certain merits. Father's Day is both a celebration of family and a reminder that Dads are different from Mums. You do not have to be opposed to gay marriage (I am not) to know that paternal affection is different from motherly love. Ideally, we need both. Father's Day, for all its commercial cheesiness, is a recognition of that.
What is the role of fathers? Apart from the whiff of tobacco and Old Spice aftershave, what do fathers evoke? If that toolbox card is any guide, Dads are meant to be DIY aces, erecting shelves and hanging doors. But that has always been my wife's department. I am hopelessly impractical. My duties at home are the cooking and vacuuming. Stereotypes are not infallible.
Are fathers meant to be disciplinarians? In my childhood that task usually fell to my dynamic mother. My father, a schoolmaster who taught Latin and Greek, was a more distant figure, likely to be absorbed in some volume of Virgil or Homer, or to be found beetling into Cirencester in his Sinclair C5 electric tricycle.
He wore two wristwatches and was a stinging critic of decimalisation. He was not as eccentric as the 2nd Baron Redesdale, who used hounds to hunt his daughters, the Mitford sisters, but my father was certainly unusual.
Although he had suffered terrible sadness, I never saw him cry. One role of fathers, back then, was to demonstrate emotional continence. Maybe that was not altogether a bad thing.
Fathers can still provide emotional counterbalance. Where mothers will cluck over their chicks, spitting on hankies to wipe clean the little ones' mouths, even the most modern dads tend to be more phlegmatic.
Every family needs one parent who is comparatively laid-back. When children graze a knee, mothers say 'poor diddums' while fathers will more likely grunt 'that'll teach you not to run around the place so much'.
Mark Twain said: 'When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant that I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.'
Fathers like to offer practical advice. Think of Shakespeare's Polonius in Hamlet, giving a long list of dos and don'ts to his son Laertes before the boy leaves Elsinore for university. Dads have been round the block. They have experienced hangovers and prangs and career setbacks. They may also, in the distant past, have been dumped by girls they fancied. When the same things happen to their children they ache for them, even if they don't always say so. You need not put everything into words.
I never told my father, precisely to his face, that I loved him. He has been dead 15 years and I still think, often, of his floppy sun hats, his stubborn decency and his dry, precise voice when he read the lesson in church.
I think of his crabbed bowling action in cricket, his weakness for pink ice cream, of the times his straw hat was sent flying by the wind, and the way, when we were tiny, he would blow raspberries on our tummies.
I think of his sloped handwriting – to stumble across it on an old letter is to have him suddenly back in the room. And I think of the way he would lean forward at the steering wheel when overtaking other vehicles. He did that to make the car go faster.
Like many of his generation he was gripped by economy. When driving to Cheltenham, on the long descent down Cleeve Hill, he would switch off the engine to save petrol.
Such a man lodges in your heart, even if you do not tell him so.
Our son and two daughters, now grown-up, were always encouraged to make a fuss of my wife on Mothering Sunday but we never went in much for Father's Day.
When they were little the children might dart into my study early on the day and furtively slip me a home-made card before scampering away with blurted good wishes. I used to love that, even if I pretended to be unfazed.
Will they mark this Father's Day? I suspect they might send me an email. It won't matter if they forget. They are fine children, and I don't need a card to tell me that.
But if others wish to celebrate Father's Day, that is tremendous.
Let the country cherish Dads for their quietness, their quirks and thirsts, their hobbies, terrible clothes, noisy nose-blowings, competitive lawn-mowing and their obsession with stacking the dishwasher in a certain way. Even for those terrible shorts they wear on holiday.
I am pretty sure my dear Papa knew what I felt about him, for we were similar, just as my son is like me. The relay baton of life passes from generation to generation.
My father used to take me to watch Gloucestershire at the Cheltenham cricket festival, where his own father had taken him in the 1930s. Decades later I took both him and my son to the same festival. He pocketed that with a quiet sigh of satisfaction. He knew, all right.
On the morning of the day he died, aged 82, I slipped into the hospital not long after dawn. The nurses had lowered his bed to the floor to stop him falling out of it.
I sat on the floor and, although his eyes and mouth were shut, I talked a little. Then I recited the Nunc Dimittis, the biblical canticle that starts 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.' That, perhaps, was as close as I ever came to saying, 'I love you, Daddy.'
As I was about to leave, his left hand moved across his chest and gave his right shoulder a scratch. Or was he giving me an old, Roman salute of valediction? I have never been quite sure. Today I will make the same gesture in silent tribute to the man I was lucky enough to call my father.
