Caroline O'Donoghue: Why fathers are notoriously difficult to buy for
This weekend is my father’s birthday, and I find myself in the exact same position as I did last year: legally forbidden from seeing him — and trying to overcompensate with something from Amazon. It’s hard. We were both born on decade-turning years — him 1950, me 1990 — so we always hit the big milestones a few weeks apart. Last year was particularly difficult. My 30th and his 70th were both jolly but reasonably downbeat affairs as we promised one another that the real party would come next year.
It is now next year and the real party is not coming. So here I am, doing what every millennial child does when birthdays and Christmas rolls around: I look at gift guides. I trawl endless online lists, all called things like ‘The Best Gifts for EVERY Kind of Dad’, ‘Presents for the PICKIEST Fathers’ and ‘Here’s Some Fancy Shit for that Old Guy Who Lives In Your Mum’s House’.
I used to work at an online magazine, and gift guides for dads were as reliable as a geyser: three times a year they would erupt in a hot, drenched flurry of digital alarm clocks, cashmere scarves, and single malt whiskies. Fathers are notoriously difficult to buy for, which leads to the creation of father archetypes that I’m not convinced actually exist.
‘For the dad who is mad about gadgets’ comes the first headline. I scroll past.
My dad has a strict, often-uttered rule that he refuses to learn about anything that was invented after 1975. To this, I ask if he has ever sent a fax. He waves his hand, the sultan-like wave of ‘I had people to do that for me’. Which is fair enough. When I was growing up my dad had an office in town where I would sometimes wait for a lift home. This is the sum total of what that office meant to me: a glorified bus shelter. He would record his correspondence into a dictaphone for his secretary to then type up, and I would sit there and zone out. This strikes me as something absolutely fantastical now, like something from a parallel dimension: the fact that, within my lifetime, there was a whole generation of men who never had to indulge in the garish act of typing.
So, no. I do not have a ‘gadget dad’, but I’m mildly envious of the people, whoever they are, that do. There seems to be an endless supply of gifts for Gadget Dad. We move on. Next on the list is: ‘the dad who is snobby about coffee’, and then three espresso machines. This is a toughy. My dad loves coffee but he loves it as a social act, rather than a gastronomical one. He has a regular coffee appointment with his friends, a group of men who all met while colonising the South Mall in the 1980s and 90s. They are, whether they like it or not, an unofficial book club for this column. I regularly hear from Dad mid-week to hear about what his friend Johnny London thinks of last week’s installment, and I strongly suspect that Johnny London’s opinions aren’t so much freely given as extracted, and that my dad is holding all these poor men at gun-point while reading these pieces aloud.
The list of Dad archetypes gets longer: ‘for the Dad who loves being in the garden’. Then there are some fancy garden gloves. I immediately dismiss this.
My dad loves the garden but what he loves most of all is sitting and reading in it. You know that family, the Greyjoys, whose motto is ‘We Do Not Sow’? This is a motto shared by the O’Donoghues. My mother, a Fahy, is a great sower, a born maker, a tiller of the soil. My father does not only not garden, he is proud of not-gardening. “Feel my hands,” he says, whenever anyone asks him to do hard labour. His palms are silken, like he’s been wearing gloves soaked in Vaseline. “You don’t get these hands from gardening.”
The more I browse these gift guides, the more I question the need for their existence. Why don’t any of us know what to buy our fathers?
There’s a mystery around Dads, I think, particularly if you grew up in a traditional nuclear family. They go to work, they come home, they watch the news, they talk to your mum, they tell you a bedtime story if they can fit it in. At the weekends they read their books or they watch some sport or they might do odd jobs around the house. This is when you’re supposed to glean what their interests are, and why so many dads wind up getting rakes for Christmas. It’s like watching someone eat a bowl of soup on their lunch hour, and then determining that they must really, really love soup. You’re not watching their great passion unfold; you’re watching what they’re able to fit in around the edges.
At this point in my career, I’ve spent many columns observing my dad’s little foibles, and I do this for two reasons: one, he appreciates it. Not everyone appreciates being written about, and so a writer must prey on the poor souls who do. Two, the older I get, the more I realise that I might look like my mum, but the actual guts of my personality is my dad. We are both wafting oddballs who like to be left alone to marinate in our own narrow interests. We like old movies and quiet afternoons, followed by laughing dinners and mad half hours where everyone tells us how outrageous we are.
Which leads me to the inevitable conclusion that the best gift you can give anyone is a sign that you’ve noticed them, that you are noticing them, and enjoy every moment of doing so. It’s just a pity you can’t get that on Amazon Prime.
- Caroline O'Donoghue is a Cork-born writer living in London. She is the author of and .
