Chris Dry: Daddy cool

I KNOW I'm not the first journalist who, as an absentee father, has brought up an absentee son. It was a fact brought home to me vividly the other week. On my longest day of the year, that of the Edinburgh Moonwalk, I found myself again following the pink parade home on foot, unable to find a taxi after publishing a late, late edition of the paper carrying pictures of the more photogenic promenaders.

Even at 2.30 in the morning I still felt I should wait up until the not-so-small hours in case No 1 son made an appearance. Eventually he did. Both too tired to chat, we grunted our greetings and hit the hay.

Yet, a week on, just when those once elastic bonds of consanguinity seem stretched to gossamer thinness, the boy insists he and dad sit down to watch the World Cup together.

I'm touched. There is real pathos in his fabulous notion that I might take pleasure in the ineffably torrid spectacle of England's lions-turned-donkeys limping, diving and expostulating to ignominious defeat. But the symbolism is unmistakable. By positively adjuring me to watch the game, he pays tribute both to the few drops of undiluted English blood I have bequeathed him, and allows me to reenact a lifetime of self-sacrifice by enduring the longest 90 minutes (plus extra time) I've ever experienced.

No doubt I will also have to teach him again the principles of good sportsmanship, scraping him gingerly off the ceiling, as I used to do when he lost at snakes and ladders as a child.

But there's more. No 1 son has also announced he will be paying his first visit to his grandmother down south without his dad. My wife and I have long joked about our soon-to-be-empty nest, but his Nanna's is emptier even than that (and not merely because of the carnivorous cat that thinks it owns the place). My mum will be made up. I may have instilled in the boy a love of the Big Smoke that would have impressed Dr Johnson himself, but he also knows how delighted she will be to play host to him and his girlfriend.

Now, I was packed off to my granny every other week as a small child. I worshipped the ground she walked on (until she became "a bit peculiar") and proposed marriage more than once, though I wasn't yet ten years old. But these days grandparents are perhaps luckier, living long enough to see their grandchildren grow to adulthood.

And one day, who knows, my boy will be a proud man if he can send home to his own mum such a shining ambassador of filial piety... no pressure.

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday July 4, 2010