Diary Of A Bad Dad

Monday morning in the office (I would say don’t tell the boss,but as he always reads this it’s a bit pointless) always involves a five-minute or so run down of the weekend’s talking points with work colleagues.

For years, the subject matter was the holy trinity - football, booze and birds (yes, I know that’s un-PC but I’m over 50 and come from Leeds, so what do you expect?).

The emphasis has changed - as it does when you get married, swop a barrel load of lager for an impudent bottle of Rioja, and your footy team spends 10 years languishing out- side of the Premiership.

But nothing had quite prepared me for the post weekend debrief I had with my colleague on Monday.

He like me, is a 50-something dad with a toddler (they put some good stuff in the tea at Telegraph Towers) and while I wouldn’t go as far as to say we’re “new men’’ but we’re both besotted with our respective daughters and revel in their development.

But if anyone had told me that one day I would have a lengthy conversation about baby poo – frequency, consistency, aroma – and be genuinely engrossed by it, I would have told them they were talking ...! ComedianTim Vine has won a funniest joke contest at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the second time. His winning gag was: ‘I decided to sell my Hoover… well, it was just collecting dust’. It made me laugh, but I can’t believe no-one’s ever cracked it before – perhaps it just existed in a vacuum.