"House opposite has been sold," he said pointedly today during The Simpsons break (never, never will a conversation be started during the show itself, and most of our deepest dialogues take exactly two and a half minutes).
"Oh," I said. I don't really care about the real estate market, to be honest: if I did, I probably wouldn't be living at home with my father.
"Yep," dad continued. "To a man. 25 years old."
I looked at him in surprise, and dad pretended to watch an advert about toilet roll. There was a silence.
"Single, apparently," he added. "Single, home owner, living just across the road. I was chatting with Anne about it."
(Anne is our next door neighbour. We have never talked. There's no reason to.)
"Oh," I said coolly.
There was another pause.
"Yep. Quite impressive, single guy: quite attractive too, I've heard."
And then my dad turned and winked at me.
"Dad," I asked him after a few stunned seconds. "Do you have a crush on our new neighbour?"
"No!" dad shouted, predictably upset that I had accused him of gayness. "I'm thinking about you," he added in a slightly more controlled voice.
"This isn't the Waltons, you know," I said. "You don't have to try and make me marry anybody within a fifty metre radius."
"Humph," I'm pretty sure I heard him mutter as he went to put the kettle on. "I reckon we're going to have to spread the net a little further than that if we're going to have any luck."
In a normal family, trying to set your daughter up with the 'new guy across the street' before you've even met him would be weird enough. From my dad, however, this is even more worrying. This is a man who - until I was 21 - walked out of a room if I said the word 'boyfriend'. A man who referred to my partner of three years as 'that guy'; who still purses his lips when I go out on dates, and who categorically informed me when I had my heart broken last year that 'romance was for girls'. Any mention of grandchildren - despite the fact that I am 28 this year - brings him out in hives, and he then rocks into the distance, scratching and muttering 'too soon, too soon'.
And now here he is: effectively wrapping me in a pink bow and leaving me at number 19 with my dowry in a parcel round my neck. These days, I think even a road between us seems - to my poor old dad, who just wants a bit of space - like a better option than nothing at all.
"Thanks for the unnecessarily detailed update," I managed when The Simpsons had finished, "but I think I can handle my own love life."
There was a small silence, and then dad lifted an eyebrow.
"Can you?" he said in genuine surprise. "Oh. That's good, then."
I'll tell you something, though: if Mr Single HomeOwner and 25 suddenly turns up on our doorstep to return - ooh, I don't know - a lawnmower, or a bowl, or a packet of sugar, my dad's going to have some explaining to do. Frankly, if I move out for a man, I'm moving further than that.
Posts
