Me, my grown-up daughter, and a night out with Take That

I assume that, at 18, my daughter sees me as she might see a cracked iPhone that needs updating: occasionally useful, a bit scruffy looking, prone to making weird noises, and always interrupting her with unnecessary notifications. Not slick or exciting or anything you’d show off to your friends. Just there.

To be clear, my daughter is very kind to me. We get on well. She hardly ever rolls her eyes when I walk into a room. The sense that I might be a slightly ridiculous pity-figure exists almost entirely in my own head.

She’s got a busy and interesting life: I just want to be likeable enough for her to put the odd hour aside sometimes. I don’t want to become one of those dads who answers the phone to their adult daughter later in life and has nothing to say other than “I’ll just get your mum.”

I worry that she might find me a bit annoying. I wouldn’t blame her – I find me a bit annoying. I’m always zoning out, forgetting stuff, gawping silently into space, snoring, burping, expressing opinions on matters I know little about or shouting at the television. 

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When she was little, we’d go to the cinema and then out for something to eat, and I felt as if I could reliably deliver the highlight of her day. She would find my funny voices and impersonations entertaining. I made up bedtime stories that could make her howl with laughter. Now she is at university doing a psychology degree. She knows stuff. She’s got loads of mates, her own life in a faraway city, and far more interesting preoccupations than her old man.

I’d like us to stay mates, but I worry I might no longer be prime mate material. So when I got an invitation to a slightly fancy do, the premiere of a new Netflix documentary about Take That, I asked if she fancied coming along with me. I made the invite sound casual, like it was no big deal. I wanted to give off the vibe that this was the sort of thing I was invited to all the time but never mentioned.

I was protecting myself from what I thought would be probable rejection. Or, even worse, that she would accept the invitation but do so out of a sense of obligation. Not only did she say yes, she seemed genuinely keen to do so.

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She dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, and looked effortlessly cool. She told her mates she was going and asked me if there would be free popcorn. I said there probably would be, while trying to sound as if I were the sort of urbane sophisticate who wasn’t too bothered about popcorn availability. I spent longer than usual deciding what to wear. This didn’t feel like taking my little girl out for a treat. It felt like attending an adult evening out with a grown-up daughter.

At the cinema, I bumped into a couple of old work colleagues. I introduced them to my daughter and felt proud as she chatted to them breezily. Later, she told me she really liked meeting them. She asked lots of questions about who everyone was, what they did, and how I knew them. There really was free popcorn. And free cocktails. She confidently helped herself to a Martini and asked me to pose for a photo with her on the red carpet. I sipped a Coke and wondered who the real adult was.

She was excited but not dazzled; impressed but not overwhelmed.

After the screening, the three remaining members of Take That took to the stage and performed a couple of songs. My daughter and I swayed gently from side to side, our hands in the air, as Back for Good played. I glanced across at her, and she beamed at me, joyful and unselfconscious.

I felt a small, surprising thrill at the idea that she’d glimpsed a version of me that wasn’t entirely familiar
– a man who occasionally exists beyond the sofa, the football, the cups of tea, the tattered tracksuit bottoms and the flatulence. 

The next morning, she was back to teasing me about my deafness, and I was back to over-explaining things she already knew. It was oddly reassuring. Nothing fundamental had changed. It was just that, for one evening, she’d maybe seen a slightly different me. Still a twat, but a twat worth hanging out with once in a while.

Sam Delaney’s book Stop Sh**ting Yourself: 15 Life Lessons That Might Help You Calm the F*ck Down is out now (Little, Brown, £22) and is available from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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