Dad You Suck: And other things my children tell me. Tim Dowling

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СКАЧАТЬ our troubled father–son collaboration will make a charming Guardian Weekend column. Also I have a deadline, and nothing else has happened to me all week.

      In my account I am rashly frank regarding the extent of my contribution, because I figure it’s the only credit I will ever get for my work – indeed for any of my primary school projects.

      But that Friday something happens that I don’t expect: Ringo Starr is awarded first prize in the egg competition. I am quietly overjoyed, and also surprised. In ten years, none of my three children has ever won the egg competition. Even Joseph Cast Into The Pit By His Brothers, a biblical tableau produced by my oldest son under my unstinting micromanagement and requiring no fewer than seven eggs, failed to move the judges.

      By an awful, if wholly foreseeable accident of scheduling, the column in which I had been so rashly frank regarding the extent of my contribution to my son’s Easter egg competition entry appears in print on the day of the annual school Fun Run.

      I am sitting on a picnic rug near the back leg of the Fun Run course, drinking coffee and trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Another father of my acquaintance approaches.

      ‘So,’ he says, ‘I understand you engineered a victory in the egg competition. Nice one.’

      ‘I didn’t know it was actually going to win,’ I say.

      ‘I heard you slipped in a Fabergé egg,’ he says. ‘That’s the rumour.’

      ‘It was an egg playing the drums,’ I say, weakly.

      From where I am sitting, I can see my wife circulating with a copy of the Guardian Weekend magazine, just in case any of the other parents have missed the column in which I was so rashly frank. She stands over them, pointing out relevant passages. Eventually she returns to our rug.

      ‘Everyone’s shocked,’ she says.

      ‘You’re jealous,’ I say, ‘because you’ve never won anything.’

      ‘That’s a lie,’ she says. ‘I won for a Book Week costume. Captain Underpants.’

      ‘You sent that child to school in his pants. In March.’

      ‘And a bathing cap,’ she says. ‘It was brilliant.’

      ‘Well, they can’t take my prize away,’ I say. ‘He’s already eaten the jellybeans.’

      ‘Ooh,’ she says. ‘There’s the headmistress. I’m going to show her.’

      ‘Please don’t do that,’ I say, but she is gone. I watch my sons jog around cones, wondering how many relatives I’ll have to invent to pad out their Fun Run sponsorship forms. I think back to a humiliating encounter with my seventh-grade science teacher, who felt he had reason to suspect that my project on The Causes And Symptoms Of Gum Disease did not spring from a private passion.

      ‘Is your father a dentist or something?’ he asked.

      ‘Yes,’ I replied, feebly. I have a sense of an unbroken line of academic corruption, passing from generation to generation.

      ‘Look how many I’ve done,’ says my son, pointing to the little stickers decorating the number on his front, each representing a completed lap.

      ‘Wow,’ I say. He turns to show me his back, on which he has a different number, equally studded with stickers. ‘Where did you get that?’

      ‘Someone gave me theirs. Can I have money for an ice cream?’

      ‘You can’t just appropriate someone’s number,’ I say. ‘You’re meant to run your own—’ I stop, because I realize his only responsibility is to sponsors I have yet to invent.

      ‘The headmistress would like a word with you,’ my wife says.

      Fortunately, the headmistress, who is holding the magazine my wife has lately presented to her, is smiling. I am smiling, too, as broadly as I can manage in the circumstances. It is ironic, the headmistress says, that this year they had gone out of their way to ensure that prizes went only to entries that were clearly the children’s own work.

      ‘That’s a sort of double deceit,’ my wife says, ‘because he deliberately made it look like he didn’t help.’

      That’s not true, I want to say. Yes, there was a certain deliberate naive quality, but that was just part of the effect, so the materials could be seen for what they were as well as for what they represented – a section of loo roll cardboard serving as a snare drum; arms that are still identifiable as pipe cleaners. It’s about clarity of vision. It was never about the jellybeans.

      I don’t say this, though, because everyone is laughing, and I think it best to laugh along as realistically as possible.

       CHAPTER TWO

      Did I teach my children to use the internet? I certainly don’t remember offering any lessons or demonstrations. I first got online at some point in 1997, before two of my three sons were even born. My recollection of the web in those days is of a half-finished cyber-suburb, a construction site giving on to vast fields. There wasn’t much to do, and there was hardly anyone around. And it was slow. For a long time, sending emails just seemed like a less reliable form of faxing.

      In the early days I stood over my children when they used the internet, not because it was a threatening new environment, but because it was expensive. One thought twice before going online to seek information; it wasn’t even that likely you’d find it, and it might turn out to be quicker and cheaper to drive to the library and ask someone. The internet was, first and foremost, a test of one’s patience.

      My children were eerily patient with it, which is why my supervision eventually became patchy. A six-year-old will wait all day for some stupid online game to load. I won’t. The first hard evidence that my children were using my computer without my knowledge came from the computer itself.

      You’ll know what I mean by it, even though I had to look up the correct term: saved form data. It refers to those words and phrases you type into little boxes on your computer, which your computer then stores so it can helpfully offer them up as suggestions in the future. So, for example, whenever you type a ‘T’ into Google, you might be greeted with this list:

      technical term remembering box suggest type in Google

      Tim Dowling

      Tim Dowling smug

      Tim Dowling twat

      That’s what I get, anyway. None of us, I suspect, would care to be judged by his saved form data – I’m embarrassed for myself on a regular basis – but occasionally I am greeted by search terms I know I have never typed. Once, for instance, I typed a ‘Y’ into Google and was greeted with ‘YouTube 10 most funneist goals’. It’s a typical example of a clutch of unfamiliar search terms one might file under Poor Spelling Fails To Yield Desired Results, along with ‘1000 beast footballgames’ and ‘stange insturments’.

      When my children were small they were permitted to use my work computer under circumstances that numbered precisely zero, but I knew that if they wished to СКАЧАТЬ