Chris Dry: Daddy cool

WE'RE off to see the 'rellies', and I can already picture Number One son in a suit and tie, Brilliantined combover à la Bart Simpson. No, I'm not that cruel.

It's fairly seldom we touch base with our kith and kin, so I'm always pleasantly surprised that the boy plays his part with such poise and aplomb. Barely a squirm or a grimace will you see when he is told how much he has grown and what a fine young gentleman he is becoming. He will laugh gamely as some aunt or uncle reminisces about his toddler tantrums or infant indiscretions.

His Cheshire Cat smile won't falter when he finds, even on the verge of adulthood, that he is still being addressed in the third person (I remember it well: "How's Christopher? He'll be burning the midnight oil studying for exams now. Well, we can be sure he won't disappoint his mum and dad, eh!")

He certainly didn't learn his impeccable manners from me. I could never disguise how much I loathed family gatherings as a child. To begin with, I would whinge piteously for the duration of the interminable car journey to any Dry get-together. And once there, though struck dumb with shyness, my body language was so eloquent, I became a magnet for well-meaning cousins trying to jolly me out of my sulks. That somehow made it worse.

Talking of cousins, the boy has always been on the best of terms with his. Family albums testify how they became pals and playmates, whereas I haven't seen a single one of my nine cousins (there were once 11) in nearly 20 years. They live, you might think, in a parallel universe – even to the extent that one of them has unwittingly fathered my boy's exact namesake, who is growing up as an Australian in Adelaide. Will these doppelgangers ever meet?

Don't think I don't feel ashamed about this state of affairs. I can only blame it on the idealism of youth. As a firebrand socialist, I dreamed that the accidents of birth that led to such an unequal distribution of congenial relatives would be abolished come the revolution… along with the invidious inequalities of wealth and education. I grappled my friends to my soul with hoops of steel, and kept my distance from the rest of the family.

But I am beginning to learn the sad truth that friends, however dear, come and go, and the 'rellies' remain. Number One son may eventually discover that whatever its specific gravity (does all the sugar turn to alcohol?), blood really is thicker than water.

A sobering thought, but a timely one, as the boy prepares to pay his last his respects to my own Daddy Cool.