Dad You Suck: And other things my children tell me. Tim Dowling

      After half an hour spent holding an empty loo roll tube and staring into space, I am suddenly struck by inspiration.

      ‘We’re going to need more of these,’ I say. ‘Bring me some glue and some wooden matches.’ I look around, and see that I am alone in the kitchen. The boy has gone into the other room to watch television. I scream his name. He slouches into the kitchen and I explain my plan to use sections of loo roll to create the different drums – snare, floor tom, etc. – with glued-on matchsticks for legs.

      ‘Or we could just use Sellotape,’ he says.

      ‘No, no,’ I say. ‘Glue.’

      Over the course of the next two hours I have to keep reminding myself that this is not my last-minute school project; I am merely here to facilitate someone else’s vision. I disguise my bursts of inventiveness with leading questions.

      ‘Do we think we need some sort of base, some sort of sturdy cardboard base, to anchor the whole thing?’ I say.

      ‘Um, yeah,’ says the boy.

      ‘I agree,’ I say. ‘Brilliant.’

      I find a tin of refried beans which, if Ringo Starr were a medium-sized egg, would be the perfect proportions for his bass drum, but it still has refried beans in it.

      ‘We need this emptied immediately,’ I say, handing it to my wife as she passes. ‘Washed out, label off, open both ends.’

      ‘I think you can probably manage that yourself,’ she says. ‘Because I have done everything and you have done nothing.’

      ‘Wait!’ I shout. ‘We’ve changed our minds. Open one end only.’

      The boy and I agree on a late innovation: pipe-cleaner arms holding toothpick drumsticks.

      ‘So,’ I say, ‘should the arms be glued to the egg itself, do you think, or to the back of the cardboard stool?’

      ‘The egg,’ he says.

      ‘I think the stool, and I’m going to explain why—’

      ‘The egg.’

      ‘You need to clear all this stuff off the table before supper,’ says my wife. ‘Which I’ve just made, again, by the way.’

      ‘It will look as if they’re glued to the egg,’ I say, ‘but it will be more structurally sound if we—’

      ‘Because I do everything and you do nothing.’

      ‘I’m doing this,’ I say.

      ‘The egg,’ says the boy.

      The final debate centres on who will write ‘The Beatles’ on the front of the bean-tin bass drum.

      ‘I’ll write it,’ he says.

      ‘OK,’ I say. ‘Good, yes, you write it.’ I hand him the pen. He writes, ‘THE BEA’.

      ‘Actually, you write it,’ he says, handing the pen back.

      ‘I’ll tell you what we could do,’ I say. ‘We could download an actual picture of the front of Ringo Starr’s actual drum, and we could print it out and stick it on.’

      ‘I think that’s cheating,’ he says.

      ‘It’s not cheating,’ I say slowly, ‘and I’m going to explain why.’

      The next morning the Ringo Starr egg, carefully packaged for transport, goes off to school, and I decide that its hasty construction and our troubled father–son collaboration will make a charming Guardian Weekend column. Also I have a deadline, and nothing else has happened to me all week.

      In my account I am rashly frank regarding the extent of my contribution, because I figure it’s the only credit I will ever get for my work – indeed for any of my primary school projects.

      But that Friday something happens that I don’t expect: Ringo Starr is awarded first prize in the egg competition. I am quietly overjoyed, and also surprised. In ten years, none of my three children has ever won the egg competition. Even Joseph Cast Into The Pit By His Brothers, a biblical tableau produced by my oldest son under my unstinting micromanagement and requiring no fewer than seven eggs, failed to move the judges.

      By an awful, if wholly foreseeable accident of scheduling, the column in which I had been so rashly frank regarding the extent of my contribution to my son’s Easter egg competition entry appears in print on the day of the annual school Fun Run.

      I am sitting on a picnic rug near the back leg of the Fun Run course, drinking coffee and trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Another father of my acquaintance approaches.

      ‘So,’ he says, ‘I understand you engineered a victory in the egg competition. Nice one.’

      ‘I didn’t know it was actually going to win,’ I say.

      ‘I heard you slipped in a Fabergé egg,’ he says. ‘That’s the rumour.’

      ‘It was an egg playing the drums,’ I say, weakly.

      From where I am sitting, I can see my wife circulating with a copy of the Guardian Weekend magazine, just in case any of the other parents have missed the column in which I was so rashly frank. She stands over them, pointing out relevant passages. Eventually she returns to our rug.

      ‘Everyone’s shocked,’ she says.

      ‘You’re jealous,’ I say, ‘because you’ve never won anything.’

      ‘That’s a lie,’ she says. ‘I won for a Book Week costume. Captain Underpants.’

      ‘You sent that child to school in his pants. In March.’

      ‘And a bathing cap,’ she says. ‘It was brilliant.’

      ‘Well, they can’t take my prize away,’ I say. ‘He’s already eaten the jellybeans.’

      ‘Ooh,’ she says. ‘There’s the headmistress. I’m going to show her.’

      ‘Please don’t do that,’ I say, but she is gone. I watch my sons jog around cones, wondering how many relatives I’ll have to invent to pad out their Fun Run sponsorship forms. I think back to a humiliating encounter with my seventh-grade science teacher, who felt he had reason to suspect that my project on The Causes And Symptoms Of Gum Disease did not spring from a private passion.

      ‘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