FATHER’S DAY. Or, if the majority of cards due to plop on to mats nationwide on Sunday are to be taken at face value, Farter’s Day. Brace yourself (you fat, lazy, balding, impotent, beer-fuelled, TV-golf-and-footie-fixated buffoon with the dress sense of a clown, chronic flatulence and absolutely no value beyond your wallet) for the usual torrent of “amusing” abuse.
Such is the composite picture of the modern father afforded by a greetings-card industry locked dull-wittedly into a sub-Glen Baxter cheap-laughs school of humour.
Eg, 1: a man wears an all-over chemical protection suit, above the legend: “Stanley brought his kids up to be responsible. Whenever he farted, he made out that they were responsible!”, Eg, 2: a bald fool gawps at footie on the telly, watched by a woman saying “You’ve taped over EastEnders”. Caption: “Dad proved that even at his age he could still drive the women wild”.
Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? Apart from a handful of cards dedicated to fathers caught in a bizarre Fifties knitting-pattern time warp, setting out for their hard-earned day of freedom behind the wheel of a Triumph TR4A (a car famed, incidentally, for its innovatory use of independent rear suspension: I owned one once, for a week. It was sold to me by a man famed, I later learnt, for his innovatory use of balls of newspaper to plug potentially lethal chassis rust holes), most Father’s Day cards are little more than an excuse to mock the begetter-in-chief.
An odd little tradition, this, especially if contrasted with the sickly chocolates-and-roses praise dished out to all those Best Mums in the Whole World every March. No doting for dad. Instead, “I want to be like you when I grow up, Dad — only with hair.”
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Search in vain for a Mother’s Day card with the sentiment: “I want to be like you when I grow up, Mum. Only thinner, not so wrinkled and without tits like roof-tilers’ nail bags.”
I mean, what are we? Baby-eating monsters or something? No wonder Cronus was always biting the kids’ heads off. Maybe this is why women outlive men. They get love and respect on their special day — we get abuse and derision. Surely it’s enough that we live shorter lives, work for longer and top ourselves in droves before we reach retirement? As you can probably guess, Father’s Day was conceived in America, where, before Prohibition, they all drank far too much gin and succumbed to frequent bouts of odious sentimentality, leading first, in 1890, to Mother’s Day (God bless her!) and then, in 1909 (in Spokane, a hotbed of emotional effluence), Father’s Day.
Not that dads were supposed to put their feet up, telegram in sick and listen to the baseball on the crystal set, oh heck, no. When President Coolidge finally made the third Sunday in June a national event in 1924, he stressed that it was “to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations” (leading directly to the official definition of a father as a man whose wallet contains photographs where his money used to be). Cheers, Calvin.
I am indeed fortunate to be blessed with a son who steadfastly refuses to be drawn into the tacky and insincere commerciality of greetings cards (or gifts, phone calls, letters, e-mails .. .) and my father, who art now in Heaven (or Hell, if you accept my mother’s version of events), never had to endure this kind of institutionalised abuse from me because he had legged it long before I was capable of drawing kisses on a card.
Dad took Hemingway’s advice: (“To be a successful father ... there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years”) a step further, substituting “ever” for the last five words. Think of the money I’ve saved on crappy cards.
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JONATHAN GORNALL
jonathan.gornall@thetimes.co.uk