Fathers' Day

I was twenty-four when Charlie was born and I'm forty-seven now, so I've been a dad for pretty much half of my life.

For a man with so many children, you might be surprised to learn that I was always pretty ambivalent about whether I wanted them or not. I could see having kids might be nice but I couldn't imagine quite when I would want to stop everything else in my life to have them.

Except, of course, that's not how it works: your life carries on except now you have to coordinate it in order to fit small people into it. Instead of turning up at your folks' with an overnight bag, you arrive with buggies, sterilising equipment, travel cots, car seats and also a little person who is not interested in your rules. You still stay up with friends until three in the morning, but there's no compromise from the tyrant who rises with the sun. In the summer.

And as they get older, you spend hours watching them and their friends doing what looks like dancing or brandishing instruments with results that go beyond the wildest fantasies of Reich or Stockhausen.

But it's all fab, even when the only chance you get to talk to them is just after they've climbed into the car and replaced your iPod with their one and started to give you directions to somewhere that is three or four times further away than you anticipated.

One of the advantages of having so many is that you get to enjoy all those different ages at once, even if it is a bit overwhelming at times, and you do occasionally wish you had a bit more time for each of them.

On Sunday, I enjoyed them all at once, all day (apart from Charlie, who's up in Edinburgh). My youngest two, Dan and Abi, are ten and eight, and they bought me this fab Iron Man t-shirt for a Fathers' Day present. Dan also baked a cake and Abi gave me a handmade newspaper, a handmade flower and other little bits and pieces. In the bottom of the box was this. The big girls, perhaps noticing my love of the tube map, bought me an excellent Wainright map, rendered in that style.

All in all, it was a fab day. And at the end of it, and after all this time, I still found myself thinking "Blimey, where did they all come from?!"