What to write on a Father’s Day page for a quiet dad

Ask someone for a memory of their mother and they usually produce something that was said. Ask for one of their father and it is far more often something that was done: the car outside the exam hall, the bike chain fixed in the dark, the form filled in without anybody being told about it.

So there is no quotable line to build on, because he never gave you one. What you have instead is twenty or thirty years of evidence, and that is better material than dialogue, because nobody else in the world holds it.

Write the bike chain, the torch he held in his teeth, and the ten minutes he spent kneeling on wet concrete before telling you to go inside because it was cold. Then stop. Do not add the sentence explaining that this meant he loved you, because that is the sentence he will skip.

Pick one object he still uses and build the whole page around it. The tin of assorted screws. The car he refuses to sell. The diary from a bank that no longer exists. The kettle nobody else is allowed to descale.

An object lets you say things that would be unusable stated directly. "You are dependable" is a phrase he will slide straight past. "You have kept the puncture kit in the same drawer since 1998, and I have never once had to ask where it is" says the same thing, and there is nothing in it for him to wave away.

One object mentioned three or four times across the page beats eight objects mentioned once. The repetition is what makes the final mention land, and the final mention is the only place you are allowed to be direct.

The four-in-the-morning hospital drive is the story everyone reaches for first. Put it in, but do not open with it. A page built on emergencies makes him the man who arrives in a crisis, which he is, and skips the twenty ordinary years in which he was also doing it.

The repeated actions are more specific to him anyway. The same route home although the bypass is faster. The tea made at a fixed time for a house that emptied years ago. The fact that he never asks how something went and waits for you to raise it, sometimes for three days.

Give each one a line about what it actually cost: the five o’clock alarm, the shifts nobody else wanted, the forty minutes in the wrong direction that he described as being on his way. Six to eight of these, in order, will carry the page on their own.

Every scene is a joke about his driving, the eleven identical shirts, the way he answers video calls with his forehead, and the indicator he has never used. It is genuinely funny. He will enjoy it, close it in ninety seconds, and never open it again.

Here is the test. Read back what you have written and count the sentences that would embarrass you slightly if a stranger read them. If the count is zero, the page cost you nothing, and he is perceptive enough to notice that.

The repair is not less humour. The jokes are the reason he keeps reading and the register he trusts. The repair is one paragraph with no joke anywhere in it, and then a return to the shirts in the very next line.

The opposite failure is nine paragraphs about how he shaped you as a person, with the words pillar and sacrifice in them, read by a man whose ears are going red while he looks for a reason to stand up. A father who has never accepted one compliment will not accept forty of them stacked in a column.

Two rules keep you the right side of it. Say each thing once, because the same point restated in different words reads as pressure. And keep the feeling attached to you rather than to him: "I did not understand what the extra shifts were for until I was paying my own rent" is receivable, where "you sacrificed everything for me" hands him a role he has to perform.

Length is the third safeguard. Three short paragraphs in the letter, no more. He will read it once at speed, say it is very good, and go and do something with his hands. That is not rejection. That is the maximum he does in front of anyone.

There is almost always one sentence you have avoided for years, usually because you know exactly how it would go: he would say it was nothing and go outside to look at something. Write it down anyway, in the words you would have used if he had stayed in the chair.

Put it late. After the photographs, after the list of habits you have taken from him, and immediately before the last letter, rather than in the opening paragraph while he is still working out how long this is going to take. Give it a line of its own with nothing sharing it: two sentences at most, no build-up, and no second version of the same sentence underneath.

Then let him off. One line afterwards telling him to go and put the kettle on does more for the feel of the page than another sincere paragraph would.

With a brother the material is not what he provided but what the two of you survived in the same house, and the sincerity has to be rationed much harder, because he will read three earnest paragraphs as a set-up and wait for the punchline.

Three admissions and one straight paragraph is roughly the ratio for a page of mockery. Keep the running argument alive throughout, whatever yours is: the score that was never settled, the eleven pounds never repaid, the hoodie borrowed and never returned. Then make one of the three admissions the thing that argument has been standing in for all along, such as the night he turned up with money he did not have. He will reply with one lowercase word, which is the correct response and means it worked.