Dad You Suck: And other things my children tell me

‘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 (#u3f909afe-96f8-53bb-be69-2d1d68c0739b)

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 access the internet when they were supposed to be asleep, my office was easy to get to without being detected.

The discovery of this unfamiliar saved form data prompted me to sift through the search terms left on both computers – mine and my wife’s – to see if I could gain any insight into my children’s internet habits. If this sounds like spying, let me say in my defence that I was really bored that day. I went through the whole alphabet.

Most of the searches were more or less what you would expect: ‘fantasy football’; ‘hamster in a blender’. Some were mildly mysterious. The cryptic phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’ seemed to me to be one child complaining to another – typing it out softly, so as not to wake anyone – that a website he’d been woken up to view was proving insufficiently diverting.

Then I got to ‘m’ and up popped ‘my Dad is an island’. For a long moment I forgot to breathe in. I am familiar with virtually every sentence on the internet that features both my name and the word twat, but nothing I’ve seen chilled me as much as ‘my Dad is an island’. What did it mean?

I tried to imagine one of my sons sneaking up to the computer in the middle of the night to tap ‘my Dad is an island’ into Google. Why would a child do that? It makes no sense, I thought. And then I thought: it makes no sense to you, because you are an island.

Google was no help. I got no meaningful results for ‘my Dad is an island’. The sentence did not exist anywhere on the World Wide Web. I couldn’t stop thinking of my youngest son, the most likely suspect, trying to phrase his tearful query without using the word ‘aloof’, which he doesn’t know, or ‘unreachable’, which he can’t spell. ‘My Dad,’ he writes, alone in the dark, ‘is an island.’ There are zero results.

When he gets home from school the next day, I ask him to come with me. His oldest brother, intrigued by my artificially breezy tone, follows us. On the way upstairs I explain about saved form data, and by way of a warm-up I type a ‘b’ in the box. Up pops the phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’.

‘What does this mean?’ I ask.

He looks a bit sheepish. ‘You know they have those shirts that say, “You got me out of bed for this?” I just really wanted one.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well, what about this?’ I press ‘m’.

He peers at the sentence ‘my Dad is an island’ and starts laughing. ‘What the hell!’ he says. ‘I didn’t write that.’

‘That was me,’ says his brother. ‘I was looking for a book of poems we read in primary school. For Mum to put it in her bookshop.’

‘But you get zero results,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s actually called Daddy Island.’

Over time my children and the various machines in my life came to control and manipulate me in much the same way. The children realize I do not fully understand the machines. The machines seem to know that I do not fully understand the children. The children and the machines take it in turns to misbehave wilfully at critical times. Occasionally, when I send a child’s phone thirteen unanswered ‘where r u??’ texts, only to receive the cryptic reply ‘wots good cuz’ four hours later, I feel they are acting in concert.

I am spending a long, lazy afternoon trying to print something for my wife. The printer, which has not worked properly for some time, refuses to spit out anything legible. I clean the printhead, put in new ink cartridges, clean the printhead again, deep clean the printhead, and manually realign the printhead, printing a new copy between each step, but they all come out the same: ridged, smudged, squashed.

Frustrated, I give up and go downstairs, where I am ineluctably drawn to the television. There isn’t anything on. My wife walks into the room and sits down.

‘Busy day?’ she says.

‘I just wanted to check the tennis,’ I say. ‘But there isn’t any tennis yet.’

‘Did you print out the thing I sent you?’ she says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I tried, but I couldn’t.’

We watch the Queen arriving at Wimbledon for the first time since 1977. My wife is weirdly excited by this, while I am unaccountably pissed off on Wimbledon’s behalf.

‘I love the Queen,’ my wife says.

‘I’d be like, oh, thanks for turning up,’ I say. ‘How did we manage without you for the last thirty-odd years.’

‘Leave her alone,’ my wife says. The screen freezes, with the Queen wearing a fixed grin that cannot hide her contempt for tennis. I push the remote and the screen goes blue. Nothing I own works.

‘Arghh!’ says my wife. ‘Fix it!’

‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘We need a child.’

That afternoon I go to pick up the oldest one, wondering how many questions I should ask about his school trip before I raise the subject of the blank blue screen. As I drive, my phone pings and buzzes continually in my pocket, ten, fifteen, twenty times. Finally I pull over. It transpires that the phone is logged into the middle one’s Facebook account and that I am receiving a stream of comments about a photo from the whole of Year 7. All the machines in my life are working against me, I think, or in the service of others. This eventuality was probably predicted by somebody. I should have read more science fiction.

The next day is bright and sunny, the hottest of the year so far.