Ten Reasons why my Father is Brilliant:

1) He has a big beard.

2) Until I was about fifteen, he used to cut my cheese on toast into small squares and decorate it with a ketchuped smiley face. He also did my homework for me on many occasions. I don’t know how wrong all this is.

3) When I had friends round, he often procured a large bottle of pure alcohol and let us dip our hands in and set them on fire. I don’t think their parents approved.

4) He has tolerated my mother for thirty years. I’m thinking of writing to the Queen and requesting that he be rewarded on the New Year’s honours list for this mammoth undertaking. As an aside, Father tells me that Mother has taken to wearing sunglasses atop her head at ALL times. I witnessed this at the weekend; she never once wore them over her eyes. I think she may even wear them in bed.

5) Despite being the clumsiest man in the entire world, he is seemingly indestructible. Notable examples include the time when he walked into a glass door and split his nose open, and when he severed an artery with a grind saw and hid in the downstairs toilet while he tried to sew himself back together because he thought Mother would chastise him for his afore-mentioned clumsiness. He had to go to hospital after I followed the trail of blood and panicked a little.

6) He likes Kate Bush.

7) He’s a secretive old bugger, but I understand he was in the Mountain Rescue at some point. I’m glad he wasn’t in the Cave Rescue. See, he somehow thought it’d be responsible to break into a closed-off pothole using bolt-cutters and take his children down what was essentially a muddy tunnel of fear. A few months later, the same pothole was featured in an episode 999 when the shaft had collapsed and squashed some cavers. My dad IS safety.

8) He persists in wearing a bright orange fleece while shopping at the local Sainsbury’s. Friends who work there find it hilarious; I think he’s angling for a job.

9) He possesses a vast wealth of knowledge on more or less every subject imaginable, yet still forgets my name and how many children/grandchildren he has and our faces AND all of our birthdays AND where he parked his car.

10) He can make anything out of anything, from industrial-sized refrigerators (from scratch) to silver rings.

He’s never going to see this belated Father’s Day tribute, but my dad really is better than your dad.

So THERE.