Take 70 p 3s and p 4s. Dress them up like teenagers. Pack them into a big dark hot and sweaty space. Continually shine bright coloured, flashy lights in their little faces. Shout indecipherable messages at them through a horrendously loud and fuzzy P.A system like a North Korean Dictator.

I grew up in small town, rural Ireland in the Sixties. Television was relatively new and I recall only black and white in our home. Then colour came into our home and a bizarre and rather psychedelic show from America called ‘The Monkees.’ Davy Jones and Mike Naismith (whose mother, I once heard, had invented Tippex but since that might have only been a rumour, maybe I had better Tippex it out?) Then there was Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz, who, in the deepest recesses of my mind had been a child star in ‘Circus Boy’ with Noah Beery. Remember him? Noah Beery? He was the father of Jim Rockford and famously starred in one of my favourite Westerns, ‘Red River’ with the brash John Wayne, the smooth and effortless Montgomery Clift and the toothless and utterly brilliant Walter Brennan.

It's Valentine's day. Hype? A bumper season for florists? There are articles every where about love, from The Guardian Family Section on Saturday where we read about 5 couples who fell in love at first sight and seemed to buck the trend, 'Marry in haste, repent at leisure,' to 'Sense' the RBS Magazine which has emblazoned on the front, 'The Love Issue - The Chemistry of Falling in Love.'

I went to bed last night and he was on the TV explaining what a good deal the public sector pensions are and how hard the Govt is working to make things fair. I got up this morning and he was on the Radio explaining what a good deal the public sector pensions are and how hard the Govt is working to make things fair. It must be thoroughly dull having to cover the same ground over and over again in interview after interview after interview.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, love?”

Story time is over, and the lights are out - but I’ve noticed my six-year-old son often uses his last waking moments to bowl me the kind of question that might stump a philosophy graduate.

Raymond Carver – the American short story writer and poet published a book in 1985 called “Fires”. It is a great collection of essays and poems. Included in the book is a wonderful and moving essay called, “My Father’s Life” and a poem entitled, “Photograph Of My Father In His Twenty Second Year.” He says, “The poem was a way of trying to connect with him” long after he had died.

Last month three of us contributed to a conference hosted by Sure Start in West Lothian entitled ‘The Invisible Man: working with fathers’.

David Drysdale was first up and his bit on men, fathers and caring was well received. The third was John Roger’s presentation on Mellow Dads and this also went down well with evidence of children being able to return home after work with the father.