I am my daft father

After two months, I have apparently reached that relationship milestone where my boyfriend sits down for lunch with my parents. I’ll hasten to add this happened a little faster than a normal precedent might dictate, because of my living arrangements – post financially-ill-advised move to Berlin, I live back at home. I’m 27.

I’ll say it went well, it certainly didn’t go badly. In fairness, I can’t see what the issue could have been, as both parties are particularly easy-going. However, the alarming part came later, in my boyfriend’s post-event analysis:

“I like your parents, they’re nice people. Does your brother take after your Mum? Because you are exactly like your Dad.”

Oh dear.

I mean, I’ve known this for a little while now. You start to notice the little things that creep into conversation. For example, that big event happening in Stratford this year has always been referred to by Clarkes as ‘the Plinkits’ – an appropriate name, I think, for the five-ring logo. Then there are those jokes you hear yourself making which you know would only get a laugh in your own living room.

My Dad recently recession-retrained as a Maths teacher, and has struggled a little to find the right job. While waiting, he’s subbed for teachers with limited success in Secondary Schools and with great success in Primary Schools.  My oldest friend, who has known me and my family since we were both 7-year-olds, summarised why:

“Don’t you remember when we were 10? Your Dad was like, the best thing ever!”

And he was. He was the right amount of completely bizarre to be novel and funny without going so far out of our realm of understanding that we didn’t get it anymore. He seemed to live just outside of the 'rules' of normal adults. It was amusing and compelling.

But parents are like fashion really, and what was great in the 90s seemed pretty lame and embarrassing by the time I turned 15. I had come to that crushing realisation, I had been duped: my father was not the most intelligent person in the world. And, actually, the fact that you’d heard the jokes and the stories didn’t stop him from telling them. It was official. My Dad was not cool. He was boring.

I don’t think it helped that this probably coincided with a time when my Dad himself was not particularly happy or fulfilled by his life. Bored in his job, working long hours, and returning home to be mocked or snubbed by his teenage daughter.

But like hot pants and fun-fur, what seemed like a disaster came back into fashion. As with clothes, I was more of a sheep at the point of reinvention, looking on as my new friends met my Dad and laughed, genuinely laughed, at his jokes. They would exclaim that he was ‘mental’ but with a tone that implied the brilliance of this eccentricity, and slowly I started to see it all again – the funny (both ha-ha and peculiar), intelligent and sometimes repetitive, but brilliant man who raised me (and transferred money to me whenever I was in trouble).

I observed as a child the strange vortex in conversation created when my father and his brother were in the same room. Some sort of innate script to their conversations which made it seem they were telepathic – when in fact they just knew the jokes so well they finished them for each other. And like it or not, I know the words too; I get the jokes, even when they stop being funny; and, well, I’m a Clarke.

My Dad would say ‘I am your daft father’, which I thought, and still think, is genius, being the double play on words and quote that it is. Well Dad, it turns out, so am I. And looking at you, I figure it's a pretty good thing to be.