Welcome to the Slack Dad shop, where – as you might have gathered – you can get the original, one and only authentic, Slack Dad © T-shirt and mug. The beauty of these – apart from their understated elegance and cutting-edge style¹ – is that they can be bought either for yourself, if you feel that your rights and identity as a Slack dad have not been established firmly enough, or for someone else you know who is, or is tangled up with, a Slack Dad. These are also appreciated as gifts by people who are not necessarily Slack Dads at all. They may, indeed, be very Keen Dads, and bully for them. But they may have an uneasy sense that there is actually something just the tiniest bit creepy about being too loving and devoted a father. You don’t want to be seen to be too keen, you know. Or they may be anxious to show that they have a highly developed sense of humour. Or they may just be running short of T-shirts. The kind that you go to bed in or wear when you’ve been told to paint some part of the house you didn’t realise needed painting. Perhaps you know someone who jogs and hasn’t dropped dead of it yet. Maybe they’d like to jog wearing a Slack Dad t-shirt! Unlikely, I know, but people are funny. You shouldn’t really jog wearing a Slack Dad t-shirt. You should sit in a pub drinking beer. Interestingly enough, men wearing Slack Dad t-shirts in pubs and drinking beer attract an inordinate amount of positive attention from beautiful, single women. The same is true for men wearing Slack Dad t-shirts sitting in pubs and drinking wine. There is even an authenticated case of a man in a pub in Belper who was wearing a Slack Dad t-shirt while drinking a glass of Coke, who was eventually found half-alive under a heap of scorchingly attractive trainee researchers for local radio. If you wear your Slack Dad t-shirt in the park with your children, it will keep them on their toes and make them realise that you are not their slave. You will also be able to communicate with other Slack Dads in your area. In olden days, before they invented the Slack Dad t-shirt, the only way Slack Dads could communicate with each other was by looking down at their children and then rolling their eyes. Now all you have to do is roll your eyes. But not because there is anything shoddy or overpriced about your Slack Dad t-shirt. Quite the reverse, if anything.

As for the mugs, these too are highly desirable and send out all the right signals. Look at your mug tree. Scandalous, isn’t it? All your football mugs are broken. The handles fell off and even though you glued them back on again you’re not enough of a fool to trust them to hold a hot liquid, such as tea, or coffee, or soup, or a hot toddy, ever again. There could be a horrible disaster, the kind that doesn’t bear thinking about. So what mugs are there, dangling from your mug tree? As you know, all the manly ones with football insignia or aggressive political slogans about Apartheid-era South Africa have fallen to bits. Your Battle of Britain mug – you haven’t seen that for years now. Did someone break it and clean it up without telling you? That’s probably what happened. The only ones left are girly ones with Purple Ronnie drawings on them or, for some reason, penguins. There is an outsize one that says “The Boss” on it which you once bought to boost your self-esteem but you feel a bit of a fraud when you use it, even when no-one’s looking. In fact, that somehow makes it even worse. You are in a wretched position, you poor slob. But look at the picture of the Slack Dad mug on this very page. A thing of beauty, is it not? If it were a car, it would go VROOOM. If it were a child, it would pass all its SATS and go to bed when it was told. If it was your partner, it would take it up the ... well, you get the idea. What it won’t do, unless you are very, very unlucky, is fall apart in your hands and unleash a cascade of scalding hot Bovril over your exhausted testicles. Nor will it impugn the remaining shreds of your masculinity and self-esteem and hold them up to scornful mockery. When your man-friends come round for a frank chat about any subject under the sun except fatherhood and Relationship Issues, this is the mug to be seen with. When having your morning tea or coffee with the family, this is the mug you sip it out of. This mug sends out messages. It says, calmly but firmly, “I am reading the paper, or about to. Do not talk to me unless it is to offer me something or compliment me on my rugged good looks. Mummy is taking you to school. Pass the jam.”

Look at the prices for the mugs and t-shirts. No, do not go out and get your eyes tested or run you anti-virus program. Neither your visual senses nor your software are deluding you. They really are that cheap. They are almost insultingly good value. I hope this is not because they’re made by child labour somewhere hot and horrible. Nothing we can do about it if they are. We asked the company which makes them and they said everything was on the level. Well, it was a bit of a bad line and then we drove through a tunnel but at least we think that’s what they said. We don’t believe in unpaid child labour, except around the home. Anyway, we won’t go on about the Slack Dad t-shirts and mugs any more. We do not want to appear too desperate to sell them. Not that we couldn’t do with the money, though. I mean, look at us.

I assume you don’t want this kind of thing on your conscience. And that photo was taken during the Good Times, when we still had the table.

Now, we haven’t quite set up a PayPal account or anything. You’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: by sending a cheque to us in the post. Make it payable to Slack Dad, and send it to 83 Adelaide Grove, London W12 0JX. I know, it’s hard. But it’s what our forefathers did, and they managed, somehow. Don’t neglect to put your own address on the back of the cheque. You’d be amazed how many people forget to do this. I suppose it all comes of being Slack.