My dad may (indeed definitely DOES) have his faults, but he is always good at taking one for the team. From dealing with spiders to catsick to the unpopular crisp flavours in a multipack, he shoulders the burden with the minimum of whingeing. But of course, always some whingeing.

This is one of his good points – in the interests of balance, i must assert that he is full of bad points. An enduring one is whenever i give him a lift anywhere he uses this time we have together sealed inside a metal prison, to treat me to lectures on Why You Will Never Understand Home Contents Insurance (my response of yes, but i will ALWAYS identify the correct use of an apostrophe, is not given the weight it deserves.) If a person gives you a lift, i would think the one duty of the passenger is to not make them regret it (and maybe, not fiddle with the gears or play any games that involve covering their eyes unexpectedly ARE YOU READING THIS THOMAS ADAM MILTON CRAINE?) But no, Dad likes my generosity to evolve swiftly into regret, irritation and murderous thoughts.

He chooses a bad time to annoy me as well, as i give him a lift in the early morning to get him to work. My early mornings are either non-existant (I’m happy for them to occur around my unconscious body, but i don’t want to participate) or ive been subject to Mum’s horrible method of waking me, which is to simply rip my duvet off my warm sleeping body. It’s like a traumatic rebirth performed by a deranged midwife with some seriously unrealistic targets to meet.

Still, Dad’s good points, let’s remind ourselves. Mum and I arrived home yesterday to find our house was staging a re-enactment of a classic film. You know that film with the birds, The Birds? Just like that but with slugs instead of birds. Gigantic slugs, like fat fingers on a hot day after their owner has had a hot bath of slime. They were besieging the house, a couple of them had climbed 3 feet up the side of the building. These were the most troubling, they looked like they had A Plan.

We waited for Dad to deal with it. We waited and waited some more. We have 100s of TV channels, we can wait with the best of them. But eventually he squirmed in to confess that slugs really grossed him out. They grossed him out so much that even talking about them made him retch a little. Now my greatest fear is vomit, so Dad retching made me start spasming and flailing with anxiety. And Mum’s greatest fear is me flailing anywhere near the pale-covered sofa, so the three of us were twitching and gyrating with fear for some minutes. I quipped that we could do a remake of The Cosby Show with moves like this, but no one laughed, instead they wasted 10 fruitless minutes working out which one was The Cosby Show. And they wonder why i won’t let them come to gigs…i can do without their whispered footnotes at the back every time i mention a thing/place/event/person.

Dad skipped out the front door to feed the neighbour’s cat. He skipped out briskly, to get past the danger area as swiftly as possible. We heard a skid, a wail and a crash. He squirmed back in, heaving miserably, to tell us that he’d stepped at some speed on one of the biggest slugs and slime-skated into his favourite bush (yes, he has a Top 10.) I couldn’t help it, i laughed til i snivelled and Mum gently prodded me off the pale-coloured sofa onto the more robust red one. He gave me a haughty sniff and stalked off to destroy one of his slippers.

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