Who's The Daddy: Dodging potholes is like a game on Mario Kart

Like a bill to replace a tyre so battered out of shape it looks like some sort of deranged balloon animal, and your bewildered mechanic shoots a video of it, sends it to you and asks, “How on earth did you drive around on THAT?”

Potholes are a staple of the Angry People In Local Newspapers group on Facebook. In the photographs they’re generally pointing, pulling their best compo face and down on their haunches in a classic “done a poo” squat.

Driving around Lancaster, or anywhere else for that matter, carries more risk to your spinal column than a ride on the Wild Mouse at the funfair. The sickening CRUNCH! as you hit one, after skilfully swerving around the first 10 before you get out of second gear at the end of your street, is nobody’s idea of a good time.

As far as I can see, there’s only two ways of solving Britain’s pothole epidemic. But I’m pretty sure neither of them work.

We live in very litigious times. So I’m amazed a firm of gimlet-eyed lawyers isn’t on in the ad breaks of a morning on Sky Sports News, offering to sue the @r$€ off the councils responsible for leaving holes in our roads the size of Moon craters that do untold damage to innocent motorists’ cars.

Every driver should, by law, be required to carry a can of neon spray paint in their glove box for the purpose of drawing outsized, comedy male genitalia around any pothole they’ve just hit. Surprised Banksy hasn’t done one already. Mind you, that could leave councils in tight spot. Would they leave it and charge people to view it, actually fix it (ha!) or employ a team of archaeologists to painstakingly dig it out and then sell it at a London auction house for so much money than no one in the entire county has to pay council tax for the next 10 years?

Anything else? Oh yeah. This is a very special time of the year. 26 years ago me and the boss got hitched. A wedding planned and enjoyed with such speed that most people we broke the news to assumed (wrongly) that she had a bun in the oven.

We don’t believe in long engagements, ours was less than five months. Ring bought, question popped and venues booked within a few days in late 1997, about six months after we bought our house where we’ve lived ever since.

As you may have gleaned if you’ve read this column more than once. We might not do much, but when we do we’re all in.

Anyway, last week we celebrated our 26th anniversary, at the same place we celebrated our 25th, in an adults-only hotel on the sun-kissed Canary island of Fuertaventura. Honestly, it’s so quiet there I could sometimes hear the boss changing her mind.

When your kids have grown and flown, the last thing you need is your sunny afternoons by the pool ruined by someone else’s hot-faced, screeching little Tarquin, Periwinkle, Marmaduke or Maxiumus because their ice cream’s gone all runny. So we booked a hotel where they’re banned.

The irony isn’t lost on me that for a column that’s ostensibly about parenting, I’m not a great fan of children. Apart from our own, obviously. They’re fantastic.

Maybe it’s some undiagnosed form of neurodivergence, or maybe I’m just a grumpy middle-aged man, but I’m guessing high-end, noise-cancelling headphones were invented by a tetchy electronics engineer who’d just about had it up to here with a pain-in-the-backside kid acting out for hours on a long-haul flight. Best present I ever got. Scream all you like, son. Exile On Main St. never sounded better.

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