Fathers Day

Today is Fathers Day – or, at least, I am reliably informed it is by a multitude of retailers aiming to sell their worthless tat to an unsuspecting public. I find that many of these celebration days are merely commercial entities designed to make money for greedy, faceless corporations at the expense of a public who may genuinely feel that they want to celebrate their fathers on a special day or, more likely, are cajoled into buying thoughtless tat by retail peer pressure and not wanting to be seen by family and friends as being a miserable, uncaring git. In fact, having had a quick look, it would appear that Fathers Day was first given an official seal of approval by President Richard Nixon in 1972. Thanks for that one, Tricky Dickie.

It’s quite curious to see what our retail emporia actually think the typical hardworking dad would like to receive on their special day. It would appear that the status to which they hold the fathers of this world are that of a either a necessary carthorse or an indecipherable antiquity. In the first category we have “things for work”. What better present could there be for one's father than a new white cotton shirt and silk tie. “Yes, Dad. Your worth to us is to go to a brain-deadening office and while away your remaining few hours on this planet so that you can buy us the latest consumer trinkets and we can bitch about them.” Nearly as bad as this are the DIY tools. Now, I’m all for having a pile of tools around the house and a new cordless drill would be quite nice. Mainly, this is so I can play around in the shed and pretend it is a ray gun. But for a present it is essentially saying “We will tolerate your existence in this house provided that you actually fix the place up for us. Now, here are some power tools – go and put those shelves up.”

The secondary category of presents are those that at least show some sort acknowledgement of the hard work that fathers put in but seem to show a complete ignorance of any interests that fathers may have outside of breadwinning or domestic servitude. Slippers have to be the naffest present that could possibly be created – shoes for the inside. I don’t wear shoes in the house and, since I can now afford carpets and central heating I have little requirements for such footwear (although they may offer some protection if inadvertently standing on Lego bricks). One step up from this is the joke T-shirt. What could be better than a T-shirt with a superman logo on it? Maybe this is a suggestion that one will soon be serving with “Fathers For Justice”. The other curiosity is the Dad CD. This assumes that all fathers actually want to listen to is “Dad Rock” which consists of Bachman Turner Overdrive, REO Speedwagon and Eagles tracks which can happily be listened to whilst driving to the office of a morning. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this as such but, if at all interested in this music, it is quite likely that your average father will already have these tracks in a multitude of formats. What’s wrong with a box-set of Rudy van Gelder remasters or “Now, That’s What I Call Scandinavian Death Metal vol 2.”

So what did my children get me? Not the preferred option of “Stop bloody fighting for 10 seconds”, that’s for sure,  but there is always the old favourite of a bottle of whisky. This present probably says “We bought this for you because we think you are a borderline alcoholic.” This could be construed as being somewhat hurtful but I’m not going to complain. As it was, I did have the choice of what to have breakfast today so I decided to inflict porridge on everyone.

Postscript: My family have just informed me that Fathers Day is, in fact next weekend and they messed the days up. Oh joy!. It head better be a single malt and full Scottish breakfast in bed! At least that explains why the shops are still full of thoughtless tat.