Well I may not have been up before the birds but it certainly felt like it - perhaps merely before the bees - so that I could clean the flat from end to end in readiness for dad’s arrival.

I did pretty well, and avoided the temptation, in my sleepy state, to throw things into obscure cupboard corners or under coffee tables. Hoovered, washed up and bleached the bathroom, then headed out to work.

A day of meetings and biscuits, and cups of tea. Opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of the week with the team while we watched the Friday afternoon movies on the net and ate jelly beans from the jelly bean machine sent in by a PC manufacturer trying to make amends, then took the long walk back to Euston Square and on to Liverpool Street to meet with dad at 19h as arranged.

Except he wasn’t there.

He’d called me from Victoria so in spite of a four-hour delay on his flight I knew he’d made it safely into the country.

So I sat there and read The Times and the Guardian which I was glad I’d remembered to download before leaving the office, and I pulled my coat ever tighter around myself in a pitiful attempt to keep out the cold. It didn’t work, and I didn’t have any money on me to buy a coffee, so I was quite glad when a fat man sat opposite and blocked the prevailing wind.

I gave up at 19h45 and jumped on a train home. I arrived to find a message from dad on the machine. He’d been delayed on the Circle Line. It had taken almost two hours to get from Victoria to Liverpool Street - a journey that should take no more than 20 minutes on a bad day.

Seems we’d missed each other by mere minutes and after a wait of his own he too had given up and boarded the 20h15, due for arrival any minute. I drove back out and picked him up, then returned us both home for a dinner we were well overdue.

I think the evening was quite an eye opener for dad - in terms of British TV, at least, which he insists gets trashier every time he returns home. We started with Graham Norton - fairly mild - then a several-weeks-old episode of Sex and the City, which he’s never seen before. Ten minutes in he confessed to not having realised it would be so ‘explicit’. I guess it was, too, but you kind of get immune to it after a couple of series and nobody I know thinks it’s explicit any more.

After that, The Salon, which was a first for me, too. It was perhaps not a good thing to watch with a parent. It’s a simple premise - fly on the wall documentary in a London beauty salon. Had it just been haircuts he could probably have coped. I think what really put him off was the 24 year old guy having a back, crack and sack wax.

I suggested at that point that we switch off and head for our respective beds.

For the first time since dad has been coming to stay it has struck me how much things have changed. It’s not so many years since I was visiting him every other weekend and sleeping over in an unfamiliar bed. And tonight, as I was getting ready to jump under the duvet and type these words it struck me that our roles have been completely reversed. Here he is, sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, somewhere belonging to me, and here I am checking that he’s got everything he needs, that he knows where the bread knife is so he can cut the loaf for toast in the morning, and cooking his dinner.

Short years pass quickly.

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