Aged 4
My first brush with April Fools day.

Loving dad comes in to the playroom with a couple of squashes for me and the brother. Dear older brother, accustomed to what I would grow to fear every year, takes a tentative sip.

I on the other hand, an innocent lamb, greedily gulped down the squash. A spray of fine early morning vomit gushes out of my gullet and nostrils. Looking through the tears of shock I see a mass of undissolved salt in the bottom of my beaker. The bastard filled the squash with so much salt it refused to dissolve any more in. The waves of nausea pass while dad is pissing himself laughing.

Length? There was a good 2 inches of salt left in the bottom of that beaker.
(patchsticles Me and you, elbow fetish club:, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:51, Reply)

Cheapy Card Shop
There was a special section in my local cheapo card shop for fathers' day for stepfathers. One card said: "It's almost as if you were my Dad", which is a nice sentiment for a stepfather - but even better as a beautifully backhanded compliment for a real dad.
(Normski, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:42, 4 replies)

My Dad is bigger than your dad
He's got eight cars and a house in Ireland.
(mark schmark, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:40, 4 replies)

My Dad is Bruce Lee
and he can kick your dads arse
(TwinkleFuckingToes Has a ingrown toe nail, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:40, 6 replies)

My dad's harder than your dad
And a fuck-load harder than me.

But he's nice with it.

Still, I definitely wouldn't fuck with him.
(Thebigfella, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:38, Reply)

I'm a Dad of two
but I'm still up before everyone on Christmas to open my presents.
( dazbrilliantwhites has been meaning to change this..., Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:33, 8 replies)

pearoast
A number of years ago, and for reasons totally irrelevant to this story I found my good self having to share a hotel room with my dearest Dad.

I was knackered, so retired to bed, leaving Hat Snr to prop up the bar.

Having drifted off into my much deserved sleepy time the unmistakable sound of Pissed Bloke Trying To Be Quiet started to intrude, followed by my retinas burning as the twat turned the light on. Rolling over to lie on my side, I opened my eyes ready to berate the noisy fucker.

I have since learned that at that point he was desperately trying to remove his trousers in a way that only a pissed bloke can, ie. hopping round on one leg as he bends over to try and free his foot from a trouser leg.

What I actually saw, and filling my whole field of vision, was his naked arse, as he slowly toppled backwards.

And sat on my face...

This was how I came to call my dearest Dad a stupid cunt for the very first time.
( TheMattInAHat has a particular... odour..., Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:26, 5 replies)

There was this one time I went to Portugal with my kids ...

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 15:25, 8 replies)

I'm a Dad
I met Mrs Twinklefuckingtoes 10 years ago as a twenty something with my whole life infront of me. Aware that she already had a child from a previous relationship aged 5, I was reluctant to become his stand in dad and eventually end up in one of those "your not my real dad" situations that obviously goes with the territory as the years progress.

Anyway 10 years on and he has never said that I'm not his real dad in spite or otherwise. What he has done though, is develop exactly the same sense of humour as me, talks the way I talk, respects people the way I taught him to repect people, respects and protects his mum, is always polite and accepting of other people.

Every year I get a farther days card and not because he doesn't know who his sperm donor is or because I tried to model myself as his father because probably the opposite is true. It truely is because he see's me as his dad. This makes me feel incredibly special, so I say to those of you out there, if you avoid an amazing woman for the price of some family baggage you are missing out on something pretty special.
(TwinkleFuckingToes Has a ingrown toe nail, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:57, 1 reply)

My dad is a completely
chillaxed and intelligent man. There's god knows how many stories I have of him but one that springs to mind was the time me and my brother demanded of him a boat. Being ever obliging he cut a point into a block of wood and then tied string to a nail in the front. Initially unimpressed I ended up loving bringing it to the beach to sail all the seven puddles.

It wasn't long before my dad was bombarded with requests for a proper boat that "I can really stand on". Cue my dad spending two entire days screwing pallets and hardboard together to make the most amazing two story playhouse boat. After the tears from realizing the boat wouldn't actually sail I came around and it kept myself and my imagination amused for several years after. Nice one Dad.
( dazbrilliantwhites has been meaning to change this..., Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:55, Reply)

Selfish bastard
My Dad was a bullying alcholic who I had nothing to do with since the age of 15. The selfish bastard still managed to die this year, have his funeral on my Birthday, and make me cry like a baby though.

I also had two stepfather's who were almost as bad...one hating every thing about me as it reminded him of my father and the fact he never paid maintenance, and the other who was a complete prick who begged to borrow £10k off me to save his business, then fucked off with the money and a new woman.

My Mum is a terrible judge of character (or simply drives men mental).
(Galahad is out of his gourd on yellow bentines, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:43, 28 replies)

Wrong end of the stick
When I was about 12, we were watching TV when my Dad turned around to me and said. "Sandettie, you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Logie Baird".

Not knowing that Logie Baird was the guy who invented the telly and logically it was the reason I was sitting there, the way my Dad had worded it meant that I thought 'Logie Baird' was a euphemism for copulation and I was about to get an explicit lecture on how babies are made, how to pleasure a woman and how to kill 5 minutes when alone. What made it worse was that a few nights previously, I had managed to make sexy wee for the first time by humping a fold in my duvet and my mind went into red alert and I come to the conclusion that somehow he knew. I couldn't think how though, I couldn't find any evidence on my bedding (immediately afterwards I switched the light on to check) and I hadn't made any noise. Maybe the next day I just carried an air of "guess what I just discovered" about me.

"Hmm?" I said and stood up, "ooh, I need a pee" I lied, most unconvincingly and made for the door, but I was so embarrassed and nervous that my legs went a bit funny and I sort of strutted out the room like a heron with rickets, along the hallway and into the toilet. After about 30 seconds, I came out and went and hid in my room. I lay on my bed for about a minute, my cheeks still burning with shame when I suddenly thought it seemed a bit suspicious running upstairs for no reason. So, as paranoid as I was, I dug my box of Lego out and rattled it about a lot.

That lecture never did materialise and either he was too embarrassed to tell me or he just assumed I'd pick it up elsewhere.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:41, 3 replies)

I'm a dad
and I've NEVER been so tired.
(Slipper I'm going for a smoke, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:41, 29 replies)

Pearoast: Fans will remember my dad is a bit of an eccentric - an original mad scientist.
He lives on his own, and is thoroughly enjoying his third batchelorhood.

His flat reflects his personality and lifestyle perfickly - it's a one-bedroomed place in a beautiful Georgian circus, with very high ceilings, and the bookcases he's had put in right up to said ceilings are filled with literature. There are books everywhere, and the place is full of Important Pieces of Paper. It is the very definition of organised chaos - he knows how it all works perfectly, but to an outsider it's some sort of bizarre intellectual's maze.

Everything in his flat nearly works, and being a warchild, he hates to throw anything away or replace it, but would rather make do and mend. The shower door, for example, does not quite meet the bath side, and as such, he has a magic paperclip, which is bent in such a way that, if you hold the door so, and then slide it in, then hook that bit over there and put that part in there, it will hold.

A friend asked him, "So ... is this paperclip unique, or do you have a box of them?" and verily I saw a light go on in his head.

He has a culture of rare, tiny snails that he's studying at the moment on his window sill.

One will find champagne corks in strange places - he likes to leave them where they fall, as each one tells a story of that bottle: who it was drunk with and what was discussed that evening. As such he's rather proud of the amount of dents in the ceiling.

Recycling is very important to him personally, and also to the town - they're really big on it there, so tea bags go in here, plastic bags in here, plastic boxes in there, fruit and vegetable waste in here, meat in there, cans there and bottles in there.

And do not, ever, put the top of your next bottle of beer back onto the empty bottle you've just drained.

He's a man who very much knows his own systems and household mechanisms, but as a guest ... it's like visiting a Heath Robinson contraption built by a graphophile.

He and his scientist mates have - ever since they learned about Helen Of Troy at school - rated women in milihelens, and in a 'phone call yesterday evening told me how he went skinny-dipping a couple of nights ago with one of his five girlfriends.

He's 75. If he had wanted a Honda Accord, he would have got one.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:40, 4 replies)

Dad.
Lots of my friends have great relationships with their dads, some of them can't stand theirs. My dad was my best friend.

My dad suffered throughout his life. He was the eldest of five children of a single mother living on a liverpool council estate, he'd had rheumatic fever as a child leaving him needing a heart valve fitted in his late teens. He was an artist, and a head of art at a local school until he became manic depressive. The best years of my childhood were spent visiting him in various hospitals and living in a strange atmosphere dependent on how he was feeling while he was at home.

By the time new cocktails of drugs had stabilised his mood swings effectively I was into my mid teens and he had a grand daughter to dote on from my elder brother. I guess you could say I was pretty jealous of the attention she got from him as I'd missed that growing up.

As I got into my elder teens my dads personality started to come back stronger and stronger as drugs to treat manic depression became better and better. And I learnt to enjoy this as a young adult having finally shrugged off the sulkiness of being a teenager.

We'd go to the pub together, joke together and being a student meant I had all the time in the world to spend with him. He soon became part of my group of friends and if he didn't come out because he was spending time with my mum he was missed. He looked just like George Best, he was a big smiling lovable giant bloke who made everyone smile with his stories and was an incredibly talented artist.

In the week leading up to my 21st birthday he developed a fever. Not a big problem, he just didn't feel well enough to join us for the meal we'd planned to celebrate. He'd made the effort to join me for a drink earlier in the week though so atleast we'd done a bit of celebrating together. The doctor had been out to see him and thought it was probably just a urinary infection. Treatment given, would be right as rain in a week or so. The night after my birthday he took a turn for the worst. Despite the best efforts of the ambulance staff, and the doctors once he'd got to the hospital, they couldn't stop the bleeding that had occured due to a cyst that had ruptured on one of his kidneys. The cyst hadn't been picked up by the doctor that had visited and the symptons he was showing hadn't been noticed. He died that night.

Seriously folks. I know they can be cantankerous bastards at times, or they can seem a bit past it in the modern world. But if you are close to your dad at all, spend as much time as you can with him. It hurts every day when they're gone. (Same goes for either parent).
( Evil Bastardo, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:35, 3 replies)

My guv'nor.........
.....is a bit of a mixed bag these days..
due to epilepsy, a bad head injury he sustained years back and the cocktail of drugs he has to take; his personality is quite 'varied'..
in the black depths one minute and then brilliantly humourous and excited by all life has to offer..
Sometimes I find it hard to deal with him in the black depths but then you get flashes of how he really is..sens epilepsy, pre serious head injury..a man so utterly passionate about and in love with music and what it does to the human soul..a man who grew up with and was friends with some of the greatest musicians our country has ever produced...a man whos youth was part of the greatest social change and creative explosion ever seen..a man whos Milligan-esque humour would lead him to turning up at my school open evenings wearing Groucho Marks specs and moustache..a man whos idea of a laugh would be to put rubber spiders in the marital bed to scare the shite out of my arachnaphobe mum and to make lethally high powered catapaults for his sons and buy them fireworks to throw at their friends in the streets..
Its just a crying shame when the drugs that keep him able to function make him behave in a way that you forget all these things...but then every so often he'll tell you a filthy joke or confuse you with his old skool London dialect and backslang and you see that glint in his eyes and you know the old him is still in there...
( bigmeuprudeboy is using powerpoint or paint...have MERCY, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:33, 1 reply)

DAD JUSTICE!
When I was a kid, my class was invited to be the audience on a Kids TV show that went out live. Unfortunately the class bully was in the row behind me.

We were given strict orders not to mess about, pull faces or cause any kind of scene because this was television and the television police would get us (or something equally outrageous, we were pretty gullible, and I'd say being the producer of a kids TV show is a job with few pleasures)

The class bully took this as licence to quitely punch those in the row in front in the back of the head whilst the cameras were rolling knowing they couldn't turn around, react or do anything to him. He was too thick to work out the flaw that this was being broadcast on TV, and could be seen by people. People like my dad.

My dad turned up at the TV show afterwards and immediately administered what was the ten year old's equivalent of HONDA ACCORD JUSTICE!!!!( a very public and loud telling off, and a word with his dad). I had some MASSIVE HUGS and possibly a SUPER(airfix)MODEL after.

Nice one dad
(FondaAccord, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:27, 1 reply)

My Dad is a shy, non-talkative bloke doesn't show his emotions etc
until he gets the rage and it turns him into a raging loony. His jaw juts forward he grinds his teeth and then you know its coming. Two stories come to mind
It was a Sunday so all the family together, me and my two younger brothers and my Step-mum, my Dad was off doing manly Sunday things, maybe it was a hot day as we had drank about a bottle and a half of pepsi, my dads pepsi, his favourite drink in the whole world. He comes home goes to the fridge...the jaw starts working and with a scream not unlike an enraged monkey he pours the rest of the pepsi away in a fit, his reasoning being that if he can't have it no-one can. Silly man we'd drank LOADS.

We were living abroad now and had gone out for the day, a shitty little harbour town, stayed for a bit had lunch, ice-cream, bit of a walk decided to go home. This paticular shitty harbour town has something like a dual carriageway jam packed with traffic on a Sunday afternoon with bad tourist drivers and locals alike (obviously compared to my Dad who was a hybrid of Schumacher/Mansell/Moss) after trying to edge out of a side street for the past 10 minutes and no-one allowing him to pull out his jaw goes and he smashes his head against the steering wheel, That was rather unexpected. He breaks his sunglasses, cutting his nose open and embedding a piece in there. We laughed so hard, that silent uncontrollable laughter that gives you a headache all the way home. Pops, not so much. Even now I only have to say to my brothers pepsi or steering wheel and we laugh til we can't breathe and it sets my Dads jaw off again.
(Bababoon, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:09, 2 replies)

I didn't know all that much about my dad's glory days
Until I went out on the town with him and his mates a couple of years ago. In the late-60s, when my dad was but a teen, they all went camping in the woods. Miles from home, they suddenly realised they'd forgotten to bring any food.

Cue them sending my Dad - the youngest one there - back to their hometown to pick up some supplies. He hiked back to his parents' house to pick up some grub, and then...completely failed to return to his friends. He just stayed at home and ate delicious food in his nice warm house with his folks, while his mates froze and starved in the middle of some fairly menacing woodland.

Length? Apparently they were there for two nights before they realised he wasn't coming back.
( krang, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:06, Reply)

What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?
A nervous wreck!
(Dad Joke, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 14:03, 1 reply)

The 'talk'
My father is a rather socially inept being. It's not that he's shy, or unable to converse, it's just that he doesn't understand normal social interaction. For example, if his wife is having a garden party, you'll find him asleep in his hammock.

The point of me mentioning this is that when it came to the 'talk', that is, the fateful birds and the bees chat, I knew my Dad was going to fuck it up. I'm sure most Dad's are scared shitless of it anyway, but I knew my Dad would handle it about as tactfully as Gordon Ramsey doing a special with ortizms.

I approached the 'talk' therefore (which, incidentally, he put off until I was well past puberty, and well aware of all the technical goings on of 'the sex', even if I was woefully inexperienced) with a barely concealed smirk on my youthful features, expecting a right royal fatherly fuck up. It consisted of this:

'SigmaX0, sometimes, when a man gets very excited, he gets an erection, and this is called masturbation'

Fin.
( SigmaX0 Dear Die Hard. You rock!, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:48, Reply)

My old man wore three piece whistles

( wotofco pissing in your swimming pool, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:37, 7 replies)

My father and DIY part 2
In the manner of a chirpy Irish comedian "there's more".
*gestures audience closer while smiling inanely*

Power Showers

My father announced over breakfast that we absolutely had to have a power shower installed. This device would change our lives for the better immeasurably, judging from the manner in which he enthused about his latest project.

The look on my mother's face was a mixture of fear and trepidation. She knew how the next 24 hours would pan out.

Sure enough, within three hours my father had returned from the local Texas superstore (nee Marley, with its rows upon rows of tools, paint, curtain rails and tungsten tipped screws left untouched save for new corporate price labels) with a "Heatrae Power Shower" with more dials than Mr Spocks alarm clock.

Such an instrument would surely dispense warm water under pressure in ingenious ways, much to my father's delight. The Black & Decker was pulled out of the shed and the drilling started.

The Saturday actually went well, with only a very few utterances of "Shit!" and "You bastard!". Of course, he'd failed to take into account the difference of microns in the diameter of the copper pipes he was attempting to join but by teatime everything was installed. By jove it worked.

I remember standing under this device with all the enthusiasm of a French aristocrat meeting Msr Robespierre. However, it did indeed dispense warm water under pressure.

Six weeks later, my father wandered into the bathroom for his shower and I heard him whistle as the shower ran.

*BANG!*

I jumped with a start. The noise had come from the bathroom where my dad was soaked in water.

*SPARKS and general arcing noises*

I had to do something... This was my father after all.

"What the BLOODY hell... SHIT!" exlaimed my dad from underneath the charred plastic.

He'd been lucky. The wiring had caused the unit to explode quite spectacularly, judging by the sooty deposits on the tiles around the melted shower.

Undeterred, he had another unit installed within a week. So far as I know it's still working although I fear for the occupants of our old house sometimes.

Lack of Bedroom Co-ordination

Upon returning from a happily DIY free nine months in Cape Town, the PJM clan discovered that the family home had been rented out to students instead of the "Smart, business couple" the estate agent had promised us. As a result, Dad had all the moral justification he needed to embark on his latest home improvement blitzkrieg.

I returned home from school to find my mum looking shellshocked and making tea while my Dad was upstairs in the bedroom whistling in his usual off-key manner. What's wrong?

"Better go see your father" she replied with as much of a smirk as she dared.

I duly climbed the stairs and went to see what he was up to.

Oh my.

He'd chosen to paint the room with two walls in a shade I christened "Harem Purple" and the other two walls were finished in a fetching hue of "Battleship Grey". Thank fuck I didn't have to sleep in that room, only the First Lord of the Admiralty would feel at home there.

He'd reason for his colour madness though, for he'd gone and bought several wall units and wardrobes in a fashionable grey finish. These units are instrumental to the story however.

Three solid days of swearing, drilling, cursing and sweating later the wall units were fitted above the bed. However, an awful truth began to dawn...

Despite the wall units having a scant inch at either end space and thus for once my father's measurements proved accurate he'd neglected to remember something important. The units protruded from the wall by three feet. In doing so they also obscured three feet of bedroom window.

Nice one Dad.

Six months later, we had new double glazing fitted. The builders were instructed to build a three foot wide wall on the enge of my parents' bedroom window before a narrower window was itself installed.

Looking back from the end of the garden, our house was the only one in the street with a squint.

Water Softeners

For reasons unknown, Dad had another bright idea on his way home from work one evening. We needed a water softener.

Logic be damned! Despite living in a soft water area, a water softener was urgently required and I strongly suspect that a mineral tasting cup of tea might have been the catalyst here.

Returning home from school in the spring of 1987, I find my Dad kneeling in the hallway cupboard sportiing a pale stripe of arse-cleavage daintily revealed to the street. Bits of copper pipe everywhere and a large plastic box with a set of instructions left on top.

"SHIT!"

I idly picked up the printed document and read the front page:

"Warning. This water softener should only be installed by qualfied persons. Failure to observe this condition will invalidate your warranty"

"What the bloody hell..." *more off-key whistling*

I walked into the kitchen to see my mother ashen faced and descaling the kettle. Had she read the instructions? Yes. How much had this thing cost us? A couple of grand (in 1987!). Why? Dad's tea had been off colour of late.

"PJM!" came an irritated yell

"PJM! Come here when I call you!" I had roughtly 0.1 of a second to respond to the first plaintive yell apparently.

I handed over bits of copper elbow joints and lengths of wire.

"Shit!"

I found an excuse to disappear to see a friend and returned two hours later.

"Shit!"

Despite the water softener being sited in the hallway shoe cupboard, Dad had for some bizarre reason removed some of the floorboards on the landing and my parents bedroom.

24 hours without flushing or showering later, the water supply was deemed to be working. I took a sip of tap water from the sink.

It. Tasted. The. Fucking. Same.

That week I recall an awful lot of swearing when I returned from school and on the Friday was startled to note the presence of an unfamiliar face in the hallway cupboard.

Turned out he was a plumber.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:36, 1 reply)

My old man said "follow the van"

( wotofco pissing in your swimming pool, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:35, 2 replies)

My old man's a dustman

( wotofco pissing in your swimming pool, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:32, 1 reply)

Oh man /talk are watching and they're getting well upset with this
I reckon they're going to send their dads round to beat QOTW up.

I suggest we stop now and run away.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:32, 4 replies)

Dad DIY pea alert
By any stretch of the imagination, tasking my father with something as mundane as domestic DIY should have been akin to using a wrecking ball to crack a walnut. He spent his working life designing bits of military jets and oil rigs. Armed with this experience, you'd think that getting my Dad to hang a shelf would be like asking Chuck Norris to hang a picture, right?

Wrong.

My father is blessed with the self confidence of a herd of elephants, the patience of a small child and the easy going nature of Basil Fawlty. As a result, such trivialities as a set of instructions or even a cursory moment to check his calculations were frequently skipped, much to the hilarity of the neighbourhood.

I cringe looking back, neighbours must have been regularly regaled with the frenzied cry of "Oh SHIT!!!" being bellowed from inside sheds, under car bonnets or in the general vicinity of our tormented Black & Decker Workmate.

Boiler Room Rage

Incident number one occurred when I was about nine years old. Dad decided that the unsightly hexagonal key used to gain entry to our central heating boiler under the stairs just wouldn't do.

I recall being scooped out of bed by my nervous mother and bundled into the back of the family car for the four mile trip to our local Marleys at some ungodly hour of a Saturday morning. After a thrilling thirty minutes, I was ordered to assist Dad with his project.

After four hours watching his initial chirpy enthusiasm descend into a seething rage against every inanimate object within six feet, Dad had finished drilling into the metal door installed a proper handle. He took a step back to admire his work, placed a hand on the door handle when a deathly silence descended upon the house, which usually meant only one thing.

"Wha... Wha... You BASTARD!"

Oh dear.

I looked at the door and I looked at my dad. The expression on his face was midway between rage and utter befuddlement. His hand rested on the door handle he'd just fitted and he tried again, perhaps hoping his initial assessment was wrong.

Then Mount Etna erupted.

"They've sold me the wrong BLOODY handle. SHIT!" he yelled.

Yep, to open the boiler cupboard door, you had to pull the handle *up*.

Kitchen Farce

Six months later, Dad decided that mum needed a new kitchen. MFI? Not a fucking chance.

Despite spending his working day in front of a drawing board, Dad never bothered with such trivialities at home and simply planned it out in his head on the fly without so much as the back of a fag packet being used to scribble notes on. Sure enough, more or less the correct number of tiles was procured and saws, drills and spirit levels of varying degrees of reliability were produced. Lengths of wood were retrieved from the shed. All I wanted to do was watch Tiswas and goggle Sally James, but instead I was ordered to sit on the wood, hold screwdrivers and saws, not saying a word or moving a muscle while my father intermittently sketched marks on the wood with a pencil, sawed and ranted at the neighbours' children for being too noisy. The bewildering range of aged, rusting tools were dangled in front of my face with the faint promise that I might one day get to use them if I was quiet enough and concentrated long enough.

My mother kept her distance, she'd be told to "sod off!" when Dad got fed up of her nervously dispensed advice like "Oh, I think you need to put a screw in there" uttered at a hushed volume before she fled to the kitchen to brew more tea.

I guess she was desperately trying to contain his rage and placate him. Paradoxically, she was great at dispensing useless and rage inducing advice though, even a mild mannered soul like me cannot undertake any DIY while my mother is around, for being told "You need a phillips screwdriver for that" in hushed faux-knowledgeable tones usually had me grinding my teeth within seconds. Eventually, she resorted to her last line of defence - topping up cups of tea.

By lunchtime, our kitchen resembled the aftermath of Krakatoa crossed with a Greek Wedding. Bits of broken ceramic lay everywhere, in the middle stood a portly, red faced swearing man.

"The BLOODY walls aren't straight! SHIT!" he yelled, kneeling on the floor, with three inches of arse-cleavage peek-a-booing up from the beltline of his jeans as he attempted to tile from floor to ceiling. How he guessed from this altitude I'll never know.

"Shit! SHIT! You BASTARD!" he bellowed as another tile broke.

"These BLOODY tiles!"

The tiling was completed at long last. However, in a manner akin to one of those geometric illusion type drawings, if you traced the line of tiles along the top of the longest wall, the ceiling appeared to have been installed at an angle of two degrees off the horizontal. Apparently this was the fault of the builders for making the kitchen wonky.

By late afternoon I'd skulked off to watch The Fall Guy, but I can still hear the intermittent swearing coming from the kitchen as Dad sawed the last of the worktops and cupboard doors. By 5pm Sunday he was attempting to mount doors onto new cupboards. Yep, a sturdy looking framework and new worktops were fitted. Not bad.

"Oh SHIT! BLOODY HELL!"

It transpired that we suddenly had three previously unaccounted for inches between the cooker and a cupboard. This had my father in absolute apoplexy for a good few minutes until his genius saved the day.

Having seen the light, Dad wandered off with a saw and produced a cupboard door three and a half feet high by three inches wide. My mother was instructed to keep her baking trays there.

The Record Cabinet

Mum managed to win a small amount of money on the Football Pools. Yay mum! However, instead of treating herself to something nice, the poor, misguided soul did something truly daft in an ill conceived moment of kindness in the hope that giving Dad a new project would soothe his oft volcanic temper.

It was a bright summer weekend; I sat on my bedroom floor assembling the Forth Bridge from Lego. By 11am I was retrieved from my room and sat on a creaking Black & Decker Workbench steadying bits of chipboard as Dad intermittently sawed and ranted.

"SIT STILL!"

"Hold the bloody screwdriver properly"

"Where's my bloody tea?"

By late afternoon, the job seemed nearly complete. Despite the lack of plans, the cabinet was cuboid in shape. I was confident, had my super DIY dad managed to snatch a daring victory? It would appear so.

Supper on Saturday afternoon was almost a jovial affair. My mum wasn't a bag of nerves and things looked promising. A bottle of Blue Nun was produced to help the Chinese takeaway down.

Indeed, by Sunday morning, my own construction was coming along nicely. Humming along to the tune of "Relax" which was being played on my brother's stereo, my own Lego bridge was finished. Yay me!

Inevitably, the peace was shattered in dramatic fashion.

"SHIT!!!"

*sound of needle abruptly scratching across vinyl*

A blood curdling scream of rage and anguish pierced the air. Birds stopped singing outside.

"You BLOODY BASTARD!"

Then I recall hearing a loud banging noise, the type you might hear if someone repeatedly kicks a chipboard record cabinet hard.

"SHIT!" *bang* "SHIT!" *thump* "SHIT" *splinter*

Startled I walked to the window, and was rewarded with the sight of an overweight middle aged man toe-punting the rapidly disintegrating remains of a record cabinet around the garden. The wood, tools and everything else in earshot were excrementally denounced.

The reason for the destruction? Turned out that Dad had lost his temper attempting to take a plane to chipboard...
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:30, 7 replies)

Dad stories
I love my Dad. He was the most creative man I have ever known. If something was broken, he would get out his tools and fix it. He was a farmer and he loved it. I can't tell you all the "fixes" he had on the farm machinery. If he wanted a new building, he built it. Ultimately, it was this very trait and a really stubborn nature that lead to his death seven years ago. I miss you Dad, we all do.
(countryglc, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:20, 13 replies)

Warning, this may ramble, occasionally contain some funny moments but trail off at the end - in essence, just like my dad
For starters, my dad is technically my stepdad. However, he moved in with my mum about 20 years ago, when I was 3, so he's been my dad, as opposed to my stepdad, for most of my life. He's not treated me any differently from the other kids, and yet, hasn't hidden the fact that I'm not a biological son of his, he's always been open and honest that he's not my father by blood, but by love.

He got diabetes when he was 7 or 8 (now mid 60s and still going strong), and this hasn't stopped him from doing what he wants, exactly how he wants it. He's traveled over the vast majority of the world bar Japan and Australia, mainly because he wanted to. He was in his early 20s when he decided that he was going to drive over the Sahara with a mate of his, just because he wanted to. Whilst out there, he apparently met a very stoned Ginger Baker, lying in the back of a jeep, after he'd eaten a ton of hash "to dispose of the evidence" (Note: Story may be false, I don't really have any way of confirming or denying whether Ginger Baker was indeed driving around the Sahara completely off his tits in the late 60s, early 70s)

He taught me to be self-reliant, and to do everything myself. As a result, both me and him will usually find a problem at the same time, and squabble over who gets to do it. I usually win because I point out that despite him being a risk manager, he has an appalling track record with basic safety and power tools, like putting saws down on tables whilst they're still happily active, or leaving soldering irons to burn holes in tables and suchlike. He relents when I point out that I have yet to attempt to destroy the house, unlike him at times.

We have a really good rapport, often taking the piss out of each other like old mates, which none of my other brothers really do, which makes him happy. I'm always around when he just needs someone to talk to, and it really is the least I can do, because he's put up with my shit for so many years now and never once complained about it, which is impressive.

So yeah, apologies for lack of funnehs, but I love my dad, he's ace.
(Ghost Atreides enjoying incontestable health benefits on, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:19, Reply)

I am reposting this cos I love my dear old Dad.

When I was younger, I wanted to go to Wimbledon Common to see the Wombles, which would have been about two hours drive from my Essex home.

But my Dad,bless him, saw how much I wanted to go, so he took me there.

We packed up a picnic, and off we want on our adventure.

I was so excited. I leapt in the car, and, as I still tend to do when travelling anywhere by car (or train, or plane or anything other than bike really) I promptly fell asleep.

Two hours later, I was woken up by my Dad tellinng me we had arrived.

I got hyper, was running around everywhere to see if I could find my cuddly heroes, and being really disspointed when he kept seeing Wombles in the opposite direction to where I where I was looking.

I kept spinning round just as one had 'hidden in that bush, over there' or 'must have dived down a hole behind that bumpy bit'

But still, I was having fun, so it wasn't too bad, until the fateful moment that hunger took over.

'Dad, can we have our sandwiches?'

'Of course'

But it wasn't to be. We opened the bag, and the sandwiches were gone! The Wombles had stolen our sandwiches while we weren't looking!

I was devastated. I loved The Wombles, how could they do this to us? They were supposed to be nice.

My relationship with them had been soured forever.

It was only many years later, during some idle conversation about childhood memories that the truth emerged.

My Dad had put me in the car, driven around for a bit until I fell asleep, headed to the local park, eaten the sandwiches, put his watch forward 2 hours and then woken me up.

Evil. Bastard.
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 13:19, 6 replies)