Misogynists, cod philosophers and Daily Mail staff writers on deadline and desperate for a suitably conventional angle to their story alike are fond of quoting the threadbare axiom that in order to see what your girlfriend will be like in thirty years, look to her mother. Wilde said that the tragedy of women was that they turn into their mothers; but I spend my time fighting off the turn into my father.

My mother died young, leaving me with nothing but a pendant that proudly states she was once a ball girl at Wimbledon, date unknown, and judging by the only picture I've ever seen of her, unmanageable hair and the unattractive habit of sticking out the tongue when concentrating. My stepmother, unlike me in every way, likes nothing more than to stop random strangers on the street for a chat while I cower behind hedges and lampposts, no less embarrassed at twenty eight than I was as a child. Relentlessly chirpy, she fills every second of silence with chatter or song insisting that "if God hadn't intended us to make noise he wouldn't have given us mouths", logic that even given her faith and my manifest lack would still would only make sense to me if she also accepted the truth in, say, "if God hadn't intended us to smother people who won't stop singing the Kelloggs cornflakes jingle he wouldn't have invented pillows". Needless to say, she does not.

She knew my father before he knocked up my already-married birth mother and stole her away from her husband, only to have her die on him less than two years later. This information came from her, of course - my father as taciturn as I was to become - and there was more where that came from. Stories of my father, two sheets to the wind and being pushed at great speed on a blazing piano down the Old Kent Road, police in feverish pursuit as he bashed out Great Balls of Fire to open mouthed pedestrians became aspirational to me as a teen. Other parents passed on hard-earned tips on life and love, mine let me know why you should never fill the taproom of a pub with beer and go swimming if you're the only ones there (pressure of the liquid will render you unable to open the door from the inside). I've remembered that to this day, and so far that dreadful outcome has been avoided.

Born in 1944, he was infected by the rock and roll virus in the mid fifties and never recovered. I was nearly called Elvisa until my mother won the long and bloody battle for me to be named something only marginally more suitable. Every free inch of my parents retirement bungalow by the sea is covered in fifties and sixties memorabilia of one kind or another and for my father, 1969 was the year in which he made a conscious choice to stop paying attention to the world around him. We all hold a special fondness for the music and culture of out youth but for my father, this regard is absolute. His taste for the media of the period is not subjective but a considered opinion of unshakable truth; nothing was or could ever be as good as it was then. And this isolation has incubated other points of view which have blossomed and multiplied as he has grown older like bacteria in petri dish and like an infection, passes them silently on.

Women, my father now believes, should not be allowed to be on television. The old sitcoms and Vaseline-lensed, black and white films he enjoys to the exclusion of everything else inevitably portray women in the light of prevailing uncomplimentary attitudes of the time and are there merely to look pretty; once they open their mouths or take a single dainty step in any direction they do nothing but land their heroic, lantern-jawed leading men into trouble and thus, men and films in general would be better off if the cowboys were allowed to shoot the Indians in peace with no stupid dame to have to rescue. This, my father would argue, is not merely a conceit of the scriptwriters; the women are not behaving as they have been directed but as they really are. My stepmother who cannot drive, will not enter a pub without a man, does not know how to pay bills and had never written a cheque in her life is in no position to offer any alternative to this, even if she were so inclined.

But it is for modern fashion that he reserves his most vigorous opinions. Shampoo is for girls, of course. A quick squirt of Fairy Liquid once a week in the bath is more than sufficient and is without a hint of a doubt the sole reason why he is not going even slight bald aged sixty five. Deodorant is for woofters - as is all kind of jewellery including wedding rings, the irony of which is hopelessly lost on him. And heaven help the nicely groomed, pink cheeked young lad who happens to cross him in the street wearing his favourite band t-shirt or the bewildered young father in the pub, too slow to express a favourable opinion of string ties and winkle pickers.

Yesterday I found myself sitting on the bus, looking at a woman in jeans two sizes two small with JUICY picked out in diamanté across her not inconsiderable ass, high heeled baseball boots and a mobile phone with a crying baby as it's ringtone (I nearly applauded that, such a marvellously and previously unconsidered combination of two annoyances), while a voice shrieked inside my head that never mind metal detectors, tube stations...no, in fact, ALL public spaces...should have big metal structures that immediately detect and cleanly eliminate this kind of hideousness on sight. And then it hit me, like a baseball bat round the head from a twelve year old after my iPod; as sure as if the woman had turned round and had my father's face that the voice I heard was not my own. And despite loving my parents as I do, I do not wish to see their faces looming out at me on public transport any more than I'd want to see them making enthusiastic use of the spanking bench in the dungeon at Torture Garden. I resolved there and then to banish the spectre of my father's intolerant influence and turn a benevolent eye upon those less sartorially fortunate than myself.

Until she bent over to pick up her squalling, squirming toddler off the floor and the seat of her jeans split from crotch to waistband and I was forced to feign a billious attack to cover up my laughter. Oh dad, save a seat for me next to you on the bus to hell.

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