Happy Father's Day!

If an alien spacecraft ever landed in your back garden and its occupants woke you up at 4am asking you to explain all the unique complexities of human relationships in the simplest language imaginable, I'd suggest making them a cup of tea and some breakfast, having a bit of a chit-chat about your respective planets, and then when the shops open taking them to the High Street and into your local branch of Clinton's.  Inside, the aliens will find everything they're looking for - each 'brand' of human neatly categorised by personality trait with perfectly interconnected relationships.  Just grab one card from each aisle for them to peruse, and they'll get the gist in no time.

Take Father's Day, for instance.  All the cards on offer have at least one of the following (and highly flattering if I may say) attributes:

a) Black, blue, green or grey as a 'background' colour.

b) Foreground pictures are of a football, rugby ball, fishing rod or golf club...

c) ...or a cartoon picture of an ageing man looking perplexed, accompanied by a joke about:

    ci) not having a lot of cash

    cii) being used as a taxi

    ciii) farting and/or burping 

    civ) being overly hairy

    cv) being bald

    cvi) being grey

These are the narrow range of attributes card designers seem to think make up the 'typical' father.  What a lark!  A whole day to celebrate a load of broke, sports-obsessed, lobotomised balding/greying lunks with the table manners of a pissed-up Henry the Eighth.  If I were actually a father I'd feel more than a tad insulted.  

As we were coming up to Mother's Day a friend remarked to me about how she could never find the right sort of card for her Mum, because all the ones on offer were pink and rambled on about how Mum did all the cooking and cleaning and caring, all of which her Mum had never done.  "Wouldn't it be great if you could buy a card that said something like "Mum...you drive me mad, but I suppose I do sort-of love you if I were pressed on it" she once mused over her tea.  

If I were more of an entrepreneurial sort I might have started a card company specialising in "honest individual" cards.  But I'm not.  So instead I usually just buy people cards from random sections of the shop, in the hope they might at least break the crushing uniformity and raise a smile (or at the very least, an eyebrow).  Good luck cards for milestone birthdays; kids' birthday cards to celebrate a new job.  Things like that.

I'll smash the system one day, you just see if I don't.