It is often said that folk become their parents and I increasingly find myself doing a facial expression that snaps me to, as that’s the type father does, and I want to be my own man with my own unique facial contortions.

Travelling to Hastings to visit him, living alone but blissfully happy with his dog, and a house that is far too big for one man, is always fraught with uncertainty as to whether or not there have been any recent rule changes.

I first go awry by misangling the kettle as he hovers behind me, less than discreetly, moving it an inch to the left when he thinks I’m not watching as he reasons: ‘the steam upsets the join on the kitchen cabinet above said kettle and can cause it to displace’ or some other such old man lunacy.

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Now his is a shoes-off household, nothing strange about that. What I find bizarre however, although I was in a minority of one as my wife and mother disagree, is the slipper provision: his abode is always cold. He was brought up in true working-class vintage in a tin house with one shared bath a week (if you were lucky!) and his mantra is ‘put on another layer’.

It's so cold, the first sentence my daughter, now 14, managed to construct one distant morning when I was huddled on a sofa with her and a blanket was: ‘cold, daddy, cold’ before I took her, at 6am, out to the car to warm up.

Anyhow, daughter numero uno complained her feet were cold, and here comes the odd - in my eyes - action: he brought out a ‘slipper box’ which looked as if it contained footwear from the league of nations. There were traditional English checked slippers, ballet pumps and Chinese-style silk numbers.

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She found some that vaguely fitted, and I asked him why he had so many slippers? He replied, ‘I bought a large selection from a shop in the town centre’. I told him he was odd and received short thrift from the adult females in the vicinity. He explained the slippers ‘save the carpet’. I questioned him as to how, if you were bare footed or socked, the carpets could be damaged, but some cheap mass-produced hard soled constructs would save the thread? Finding myself outnumbered, I went back to hovering above my lukewarm cup of tea to warm up.

His dog, Angel, who once achieved Channel 5 ‘fame’ by appearing on Alan Davies dog rescue with father, then wanted to go outside to sniff something in the back garden. Whilst out there, my dad stood by the back door with a towel as if he was a ring man in the corner of a championship fight. Eventually Angel, having had her fill of eating her own faeces, came scampering in the back door before father tenderly picked her up and ‘cleaned her paws’. Again, I stupidly asked the question why? and predictably he continued the ‘save the carpets’ mantra, as I wondered why he had bothered to plump for a cream colour throughout in the first place, or, come to that, a dog.

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The peculiarity which is second nature for most dads, and which will, in time no doubt be classed as my own eccentricity, then continued to the garage. He is now a collector of things he couldn’t afford from his youth, which equates to 17 vintage motor bikes and a couple of yesteryear cars. The cars, with batteries disconnected, are always kept in the garage. Upon accompanying him for an ‘inspection’, as if I were a mechanic, the vehicles were covered in sheets with one of those silver shields on the windscreens to ‘stop frost’ despite there being no danger of a cold snap in their current situ. Just when I thought he couldn’t get more dad-like, and I was in a ‘safe space’ I went to sit in the car (God knows how anyone drove in those days with a bad back). Just as I squeezed in, he yelped ‘stop!’. Upon enquiring why, he asked me to take my shoes off. As I sat in some Turkish-style zip up slippers in a 1930s car in order to save the carpet I reflected that I should have known.

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher