I was out yesterday...

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…and my indecisive dad really boils my piss. He doesn't know what he wants to do but you make a choice for him and he doesn't like that either. Or even if you want to do something but are quite happy to compromise, he won't let me do that.

He says he wants a drink in a shop, so I go in with him. He won't choose one. I've decided mine. "Any drink, I'm not bothered." If I make the choice for him, he'll then say he doesn't want that.

He says he wants a pie, but won't go to the pie shop to get one.

I want to go to a café (where he can have a pie) but he doesn't want to eat in a café. I can't eat the stuff from the Greggs bakery due to my gastric band and he knows this, so I need something lighter, like a salad or something. I look at the menu and I'm not interested. So I get up to leave and he moans at me again for dragging him into the café in the first place, and how I'm taking up space, and blah blah blah.

Then we go to the pub and look at the menu in there. I look at the menu and there's nothing that appeals (stodgy fare on a hot day?!). So he moans again.

I want to go to another pub but he doesn't. I offer to buy him a non-alcoholic drink and not be too long before the drive home but he can't accept that.

He thinks every beer in a pub is the same - "a pint's a pint" - but he obviously doesn't like dark beers, say, or ones that have too much of a hoppy bitterness to them. Or anything over 4%. Which, in the British beer market, is very limiting - there are 3,000 breweries and most of them produce beers that are very similar to one another, which gets served in all the pubs. Real ale has become samey and dull. Thing is, most people are like this. There are plenty of real ale pubs but the beer they serve, while often nice, is bland and uneventful.

It's "everything's the same" ignorance about the world and it really pisses me off.

Sorry.

I also don't go for the "Everything's the same." crap either. My dad doesn't understand why I won't eat foods that have a creamy texture like certain dressings and sauces. I have to try to explain to him that I have issues with the tastes and the textures and that I'm looking after my heart. His favourite line is, "What difference does it make? Salad is Salad" or "Pasta is pasta." Actually dad, it does make a difference.

I've just had a word about this with my mum and she's moaning at me for moaning about his behaviour to her.

Another point is this: my dad helps out a lot with the local town football club. As we come back, we go to the pub that is next door to the football ground. He is fearful that people will try to badger him into helping out. I say to him that if anyone does do that then they need to be told, in a friendly way but firmly that he's having a day out with his son.

If they still try to get him to do something he doesn't want to do, he must say so. If his mates won't accept that he is busy being a dad then his mates should be ignored.

The problem is that I would have been likely to get very angry with the person trying to cajole him if they wouldn't take no for an answer.

It's like other people take more precedence over his own family. He'll end up a very lonely old man because we've all been driven away.

Like I said: enforced communitarianism sickens me.

My mum does the same thing to me. If I talk to her about some behaviour of my dad's that I disagree with, she moans at me. She tells me that it's all in my head. All in my head? Come on!

My dad also liked to help out like your dad, but it was at his school during holidays or on Saturday, when he was still working. He'd clean the entire school, but he'd go back the next day. I'd come to visit my parents for Christmas or Easter or on a Saturday. Mum's famous words would be, "Your dad's helping out at his school, today." But he just cleaned it all week! His work friends were more important.