An Agony Aunt he wasn't...

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I never had much success with the opposite sex. I didn't even have my first girlfriend until I was 17. Most of my childhood and teenage years were punctuated with long bouts of agonised unrequited love where the girl in question didn't know I was alive or didn't care how much of a deep well of anguish I'd sunk into over her.

Now, before I go on, I should point out that my parents played very specific roles in my family. My mother was always my direct interface with the rest of the world. If I wanted permission to do something, I asked Mum. If I was confused about something in life, I asked Mum. If I hurt myself, I went to Mum (I still remember one of us getting some horrific graze from falling over one day and Dad's first instinct was to put Dencorub on it). If it was anything about being in love or girls, I went to Mum.

Dad was more of a protective shell around the outside of all that. I knew they paid a mortgage and put food on a table because he went to work, but he always seemed one step further away from our care than Mum did. If any of you were at the funeral, that's what I was talking about when I mentioned being able to read and write and how I'd always taken the basic tools to live for granted – I never really appreciated the part he played in me getting them until I grew up myself.

Consequently, you didn't go to Dad with questions about life, love or philosophy. But I was about 14 this one day and nursing a bad crush on Kathy Smith, a girl in a couple of my year eight classes. I was sitting on my bedroom floor doing something or other and I have no idea what bought it on but I was trying not to cry like a little girl over her.

Dad happened to walk past and quite naturally wanted to know what was wrong. Even though he wasn't very well equipped to deal with a teenage boy crying for no reason I was his son so I'm sure he was concerned.

Like it sometimes does when you're on the verge of tears and someone asks you what the matter is, the act of starting to talk about it bought it all on with gusto. In between sobs, sniffing and blubbering I managed to get out something like 'there's this girl in my year that I really like and I don't think she likes me'.

I can't remember if he came in to sit with me or anything – he was never much of a toucher or hugger – but I'll never forget what he said; "Son, women are fickle creatures."

Yeah, Frank wasn't very helpful in matters of the heart...

To this day I don't know what he was trying to tell me. That Katherine Smith might change her mind and love me a week later? That I might actually go off her? I can't remember fully, but I don't think I was even sure what 'fickle' meant. For some reason I remember thinking he meant 'futile', and that it was futile to fall in love with a girl.

Bless him, he was a good Dad to me now I look back over those years, but his job description had very clear boundaries and skills and that wasn't one of them.

So I'm sharing this story not to highlight how little help he was to my broken young heart that day, but to share a laugh about the inimitable style we all knew so well. If he was here I think he'd laugh about it too.

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