Should we give a fudge about Father's Day?

Constantly fearful I'll be left strung-out and squinting, I secrete spare pairs everywhere I go - the house, the shed, the office, the car, the Turkish bread crates at Aldi - guiltily clamping them to my face when approaching the kind of basic task that not so very long ago I could've managed without this mid-life crutch, so easily obtainable these days from those (courteous and professional) pushers at Specsavers.

C'mon man, two for one, you know you want it.

Some parts of my life are dingier than others, such as the south-east corner of our ironically titled "sunroom", the place where we keep the stereo and a bookcase full of CDs and LPs and an alcove where my ocular inadequacies are acutely exposed.

About as sophisticated as something hooked to the side of a caravan, the sunroom is little else than a cheap and nasty pine-siding annexe tacked to the back of the house, with painted particle-board flooring more than proving the point, although spectacularly outdone by the once-external brick chimney which now finds itself a rather confused interior "feature wall"; a grotesque fixture barely worth explaining to company, although, come mid-July, the ideal surface to which frigid nates should be generously applied.

A suite of alleged sliding aluminium windows encases the bowling alley extension and does a good job of trapping the sun (and blowflies), meaning the ugly add-on's sobriquet is not so inaccurate but that's about where the architectural announceables finish and come gloaming (Venusianly hot in summer) we're left with three feeble globes to navigate our way around the populous rumpus campus. It's in this half-light I can generally be found half-cut and bloodhounding for a particular disc to feed through an insatiable Denon amp, which, aided by a pair of Orpheus floor lions and some truly heinous corrugated tin wainscoting, transforms the sunroom into a supercharged noise chamber capable of unleashing a Spectoral wall of sound across the village that to this day remains the only force on Earth strong enough to drown out the town's 15 million yapping dogs.

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As any High Fidelity fan will tell you, there are many ways to organise one's music collection and I follow a fluid mood/artist/era template, which affords me only a vague idea of where a particular album may be hiding at any given time. Even when endowed with my emergency sunroom frames, this puritanical reluctance to alphabetise - so very unrock'n'roll, you may as well stop listening to music altogether ... or pledge your eternal soul to Spotify - combined with my failing eyesight means I require extra help if I'm to locate a desired release and sonically abuse the neighbourhood with Leonard Cohen, Peter Allen, Kate Bush or Iris DeMent (a weirdly cohesive subgrouping on the shelf).

Miraculously, it was my children who fixed this problem; more miraculously, they did so with a Father's Day gift and most miraculously of all, a Father's Day gift I didn't immediately chuck in the bin.

The game-changer was a World's Greatest Dad cap, complete with a row of frighteningly powerful little LEDs under the peak. You're probably supposed to use it for jogging or disemboweling things in the dark, but my hat fits elegantly inebriated deejaying perfectly.

I scored the trucker a couple of years ago when our primary school was running those Father's Day (and Mother's Day) stalls which raise money by laundering shoddy "Made in China" trinkets through the family home before becoming landfill.

Thankfully, that racket has only this year been replaced by something called a F.U.D.G.E drive. Because the activity is paternally related, I assumed F.U.D.G.E stood for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, Greed and Envy (tidy shorthand to sum up the male side of the parental equation) or, given my and proximal generations' infantile devotion to avatarial amusement (not to mention towering stacks of overpriced vinyl), maybe even Freeform Universal Donated Gaming Engine.

Turns out, however, in this instance F.U.D.G.E is the acronym for Friends, Uncles, Dads, Grandfathers, Etc. (the "Etc." bit another astute method of describing a father's overall contribution) and my kids came home from school on Friday loaded up with enough sweet, artery-clogging lard to see me off by Tuesday.

I can't say I'm even grateful because, as we all know, Father's Day is nonsense. Dads, and men in general, still get a bloody good ride.

An example of this is how my group of school friends has just organised a camping trip for dads and lads. There's nothing patriarchally antagonistic in this, it's just a lovely way for us to all reunite and proudly show off our XY progeny, although I do have two daughters who were crestfallen by their exclusion (one so injured, she volunteered to inveigle herself to the excursion "like Yentl").

Aping the perennially intractable Consuela from Family Guy (a character surely based on the murderous maid in Todd Solondz's Storytelling?), I shrugged and explained my hands were tied, secretly thrilled at the thought of hitting the road with my boy, both of us on the kind of contemplative journey Paul Simon and his own nine-year-old "travelling companion" experience in the wonderful Graceland.

Not that I'm approaching the trip without trepidation. As much I want it to be worthy of a galvanising folk song memorialising our small footprint on a cultural landscape, the pessimist within has me envisioning it turning out more like Frank Bascombe's doomed father-and-son weekend in Richard Ford's Independence Day. A bit extreme, I suppose, but there's nothing like the chill of responsibility up a purported guardian's spine upon realising the child's mother won't be around to bail everyone out, again.

And to be honest, after so much water under the bridge, it's existentially confronting to re-embrace intimate mateship, an exercise I've cravenly avoided over the decades, the same way I had to stop watching the new Twin Peaks series 20 minutes into the first episode because it somehow hammered home just how much has changed in the past 30 years.

But I love these men dearly and because "time is a traveller", I know when Peter Allen is serenading us around the fire with Tenterfield Saddler, we'll be tearing up as boys who have become fathers.

Probably a good moment to get rid of all that leftover F.U.D.G.E.