Fathers And Daughters, Or Rather, Fathers Who Need To Clarify Who Their Daughters Are.

"Molly - you awake?" says Dinah, when I answer the phone at what seems to be a particularly unearthly time of the morning.

"I am now," I say. "Thanks to you."

"You're not supposed to need as much sleep as you get older,' says Dinah, who never knows when not to add insult to injury. "And, anyway, this is important. I have to talk to you about Dad."

Bang goes my Sunday morning lie-in. I suppose I may as well admit defeat.

"I'll call you back in a minute, Dinah," I say. "When I've properly woken up."

"Well, don't leave it too long," she says. "This is an emergency."

Anyone who didn't know Dinah would take this statement literally. However, she is my sister, and therefore I don't.

I hang up, then make a cup of tea; smoke a cigarette; have an argument with Josh, who looks at me as if I am insane when I suggest he might want to get up and cook Max breakfast for Father's Day; smoke another cigarette to get over that; and finally call Dinah back.

"You took your time," she says. "What if it had been a real emergency?"

"It wasn't, though, was it?" I say. "Now tell me what the problem is."

It turns out that Dinah has discovered that Dad isn't just trying to sell his house because it's too big for him, but because he wants to buy somewhere in Thailand instead.

"And he's selling it at a knock-down price," she says.

"God," I say. Now that is worrying. If there's one thing Dad does take seriously, it's his money.

"Exactly," says Dinah, dragging on a cigarette as noisily as only she can. I don't know how she doesn't turn inside out when she sucks that hard. "So if it doesn't work out with Porn-Poon, and Dad has to come back to the UK, he won't be able to afford to buy anywhere else to live. And you know what that'll mean."

"Yes," I say, feeling very slightly sick, and trying hard not to think about that Panorama programme about care homes. "He'll want to move in with one of us."

"Unless we can have him declared insane before he sells," says Dinah. "If we could get power-of-attorney first. I'm going to drive down to see him today, and take him out for lunch. Then I can see if he really has gone mad with lust."

Power-of-attorney? Is she serious? Dad might be acting like an idiot, but it's up to him what he does with his house - as long as he doesn't want to live with me. And I'm pretty sure he's not mad, either - or not technically, anyway.

If he is, then he's no more so than all those other men of his age who seem to keep Pattaya in business. (I can think of a number of words that would apply to that demographic, but "mad" isn't one of them.)

"Well?" says Dinah. "What do you think?"

"I don't know," I say.

"For God's sake, Molly."

Honestly, Dinah's so impatient. She never takes time to consider anything. A bit like Dad, now I come to think of it.

"Stop being such a ditherer," she says. "I'll report back later tonight, once I've seen how he is - and then we can make a plan."

So that's something for me to look forward to - which is more than can be said for Max, unless Josh gets up before the shops are shut. I've been telling him to buy a Father's Day card for weeks, but he hasn't taken a blind bit of notice.

"Couldn't you have bought one for me, Mum?" he says, when he finally drags himself downstairs. "When you were buying yours?"

"No," I say. "If I can buy cards for both my father figures, I'd have thought you could afford the only one that you have to get."

I almost add, "thanks to the sheer effort of will that I have made to remain married to your father so that you don't have to buy more than one," but I don't. Talk about restraint.

Not that Josh notices my internal struggle. He's too busy looking at the envelope that he's just spotted on the mantelpiece.

"Who's that from?" he says, picking it up and reading it. "To Max Bennett. Not to be opened until June 19th."

"It's from Connie," I say. "Don't you recognise your sister's handwriting?"

"No," says Josh. "She only ever sends me texts. Shit, has she actually posted a Father's Day card? The bloody creep."

There's nothing like sibling rivalry for motivating a teenager. Josh throws on some clothes, rushes out of the house and returns an hour or so later bearing a card (unsigned); a bottle of Max's favourite wine (unopened); and a box set of the Die Hard films on DVD.

Then he insists that he and Max must watch all the films tonight, in a father-son bonding session. It's not quite clear whether I am invited to join in or not, which is probably a good thing as, by the time I've phoned Ted to wish him a happy Father's Day, the first film has already started; and then Dinah calls again.

It's time for the promised update on Dad.

"Mad as a hatter," she says. "I took him to the pub. And you should have seen how he behaved."

I don't say anything. There's not usually much point. Dinah doesn't ever need encouragement to continue to the bitter end.

"We were sitting having a drink, and then a group of people about Dad's age sat down at the next table," she says. "I'm sure he'd never met them before. Anyway, he leaned over to them and said, out of nowhere, 'Don't worry. This isn't my girlfriend, it's my daughter.' "

"What?" I say. "Had they asked? Or given him a funny look, or something?"

"No," says Dinah. "But after that, he kept saying it to everyone who came into the pub. It was as if he'd been sensitised to people thinking he's dating someone much younger than him."

"Well, he probably has, given what people must say when they see him with Porn-Poon," I say. "Not that you're anything like as young as her."

I haven't entirely forgiven Dinah for that jibe about needing less sleep as you get older yet.

"Don't try and make him sound rational," she says. "Not when the next thing he did was to get out all his photos of Porn-Poon and show them to everyone - while saying, 'Now this is my girlfriend.'"

I'm so shocked that now I can't face phoning Dad to check if my Father's Day card arrived. And Dinah seems to think I've agreed to find out tomorrow how one does go about getting power-of-attorney.

The Significance of Fathers, Underwear, Circles and Spirals. Not Necessarily In That Order.

I bet you can tell a married woman from a single one, just by the state of her underwear. Mine is tragic.  Rather worryingly, this thought occurs to me while I am trying to draft a reply to Johnny's last email - the one in which he mentioned massage.

I'm hoping that he was so distracted by the oil spill that he forgot he was writing to me, and thought he was emailing his wife instead. Now I can't decide whether to mention his suggestion, or to ignore it and, after a few clumsy attempts at a reply, I abandon the idea and phone Dad instead. It is Father's Day, after all - even though Connie seems oblivious to the fact that this does actually apply to Max.

I am in Dad's good books due to being the only one of his many children who has remembered to send a card - or to phone - until the subject of Facebook comes up.  Then he insists that all his young Thai women "friends" are just neighbours.

He gets quite cross when I question the likelihood of this, on the basis that: a) he lives in a really small village, and b) it's in Dorset. Then he says he's not interested in women since Stepmother Mark III left him, so I ring off as quickly as I can and phone Dinah.

"Can you set Dad up with one of your friends' mums?" I ask.

"Why? What's he up to?" says Dinah. (We have a sisterly shorthand which avoids the need for a lot of explanation, which is lucky as she talks so much that I often can't get a word in edgeways.)

"He says he's not interested in women again," I say. "And that the Thai girls are all his neighbours."

"Christ!" says Dinah. "I'll get onto it straightaway. In the meantime, why don't you write something off-putting on his Facebook wall?"

"Like what?"

"Like asking him if his willy's still bendy, for a start," says Dinah.

There is a triumphant tone to her last comment. I wonder if this is how most daughters discuss their fathers?

After all that, together with yesterday's revelations about Chris Huhne - where do the LibDems get all this sexual energy? - I start wondering if Max fantasises about starting all over again with someone new, probably half my age, and also probably from another continent.

Then I decide that I don't want to know if he does, but I'm unsettled for the rest of the afternoon anyway. I keep finding myself staring at him, until he notices and says,

"What's up? Have I got a bogey hanging from my nose or something?"

It's odd how you don't really notice the person you've been married to for aeons, until you start to consider how attractive they might appear to another person. Which brings me right back to the question of my underwear. I seem doomed to spend my life going round and round in circles.

Mind you, this would be preferable to my life spiralling down the plughole, which is how it sometimes feels when I contemplate all the unused gold stars in the kitchen drawer. Now I'm stuck here with Connie for the evening, as Josh is taking Max out "for a Father's Day drink" - at a lap dancing club, for God's sake.

Honestly, is there no end to the pressure? Now I shall probably have to learn to pole dance. Bloody hell.