Firstly, I’m not big on football. I don’t hate it, it’s just not an important thing in my life.

Like many kids, I got my lifelong indifference to football from my Dad. He didn’t buy me my first football the day after I could walk, and we spent many a happy hour not kicking a ball around the park. I fondly remember the first time he didn’t take me to see my first match, anxiously not clutching his hand as I didn’t look down in rapt wonder from the stands.

Also, I’m not that keen on beer. I don’t mind it, but I’d rather have a vodka and coke, thanks. Or a glass of wine. If I do have a beer it’s something not too hoppy and chilled to within an inch of it’s life. That’s just the way I roll.

I don’t play golf.

So really, I’m not a proper dad. Well, not by the standards of the Father’s Day Gift People. They’ve decided that all dads really want is a football-shaped beer dispenser. Or a beer-shaped football. Or golf-flavoured beer. Or whatever.

It’s all rather depressing. Unlike Jane (who has a rabid dislike of Mother’s Day – with good reasons) I kind of like the idea of Father’s Day. I don’t want to be waited on hand and foot, I’ve just never had a international day for me before and I want to milk it a bit.

But, if the Father’s Day Gift People have their way I’ll be getting a card with a joke about slippers on it, and a golfball-shaped opener for football-shaped beer bottles. Sigh.

I have it on good authority that Tom’s got me a little something though, and his taste is impeccable, so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised!

If you’ve ever perused the kiddywink section of a bookshop, you’ve almost certainly come across the “That’s Not My…” series of books. If not, let me explain to you the basic plot of every one.

A mouse (the unnamed protagonist of the series) sets out to find a thing. On the way he find several things of the same class as the thing he wants to find, but each featuring some flaw which immediately identifies to the painstakingly exacting mouse that this thing isn’t the thing that he wanted. Usually the flaw is texture based, and the picture accompanying the text ingeniously incorporates a patch which exhibits the properties which the mouse finds so abhorrent. The patch is very tactile, and teaches small children valuable lessons about poking and prodding their grubby fingers at everything valuable you own.

Eventually the nameless, obsessive mouse finds the thing he was looking for, and lives happily ever after. Presumably until the next time he mislays one of his many possessions.

The original That’s Not My book was about puppies. People obviously suspended disbelief about a mouse owning a puppy, and it sold so well it spawned a never ending series. There’s now an entire floor of my local Waterstones dedicated to just That’s Not My books.

The authors obviously started running out of ideas – faced with increasing demands from the publishers – as the subjects have started getting increasingly far-fetched. My son has, I kid you not, a “That’s Not My Pirate” book. I mean, how could anybody, let alone a small mouse own a bloody pirate?

(By the way, if you own That’s Not My Pirate, the pirate with the too-glittery cutlass, he’s supposed to be gay, right?)

I can’t see them stopping producing ever more That’s Not My books. And eventually, of course, there’ll be the inevitable movie adaptation.

I can see it now. Tom Hanks as The Mouse, searching for his mysteriously vanished wife. He’s called to the morgue to identify a body. The coroner pulls back the sheet. Tom looks down. Touches the face of the cold dead mouse lying before him. Suddenly gasps with relief…

“That’s not my wife! Her nose is too bobbly!”

We would not be one of these single-policy parties. Oh no, we would have several policies. Admittedly, they would all be supermarket-based. But when two pounds in every four in this country is spent in Tesco (I’ll check that statistic later), I think it’s fair to say that sort out the supermarkets, and you’ve pretty much sorted out everything else.

Our pledges:

1. Revalue the Squash Standard. Every supermarket these days provides so-called “double concentrate” squash. If they’re all doing it, surely then that means it’s now the standard strength squash? Under a SOS government, “double concentrate” squash would be renamed just “squash”. Most establishments would be banned from serving single-concentrate squash. Special exceptions would be made for village shops and specialist vintage food vendors, who would be allowed to sell regular-concentrate squash, as long as it was clearly labelled “Olde Style Weake Squashe”.
2. Make own-brand cereal packets informative or diverting. Those of us able to afford proper cereals are used to spending our precious minutes at the breakfast table reading the back of the cereal packet. Much like reading a shampoo bottle whilst having a poo, it gives the brain something to do whilst a vital but tedious part of the daily routine is fulfilled.
   However, we realise in the SOS Party that not all people are able to afford “luxury” cereals and have to settle for supermarket-branded alternatives. I myself decided to try my local supermarket’s Generic Malted Wheat Squares the other day, just to check how ghastly they were compared to proper cereals, and when I turned the box from it’s front-facing aspect I was shocked to be confronted by another front!
   Several more turns of the box confirmed my worst fears: the box had no informative rear panel. No blurb extolling the health benefits of the product under a warmly golden swathe of corn. No offer to receive some gewgaw by merely Sellotaping two pound coins to a faded form printed on the inside of the box. NOTHING!
   Under a SOS administration, all supermarket cereal boxes will be forced to provide diverting and/or informative information on their cereal box rears. Where they are unable to, one will be provided for them by a government ministry set up for this purpose.
3. Manned self-service tills. All self-service tills will come with a personal assistant, conveniently placed on a seat behind the till. They will aid the user of the self-service till in any way possible, ensuring that their items are quickly and efficiently tallied up, and that the chosen form of monetary transaction proceeds without delay.
   This will create thousands of jobs about the country and ensure that people will no longer be forced to wait valuable seconds for a mouth-breathing 16-year-old to wander over and press a button that says “yes this man is clearly well over the age limit for buying plastic cutlery”.

I think you’ll agree that with just these three changes, the average Briton’s day would be improved roughly 450%. I hope I can count on your vote in the election. Or if i’m too late, the one after that.

I got up to see to see what he’d delivered. It was a small red card, entited “Sorry, you were out”, directing me to pick up a undeliverable parcel from the delivery office.

Oh, how strange, I thought. Despite being here all day I was apparently, by Royal Mail standards, “out”. Annoying too, because our local delivery office is a bugger to get to. I also wondered vaguely how he’d managed to decide we were out and write that card in the few seconds he’d been parked outside.

I’ve since learned that it’s fairly common practice these days for posties, when collecting the mail they have to deliver in the mornings, to make an “executive decision” not pick up bulky items that in all likelyhood they’re going to end up bringing back to the depot undelivered due to the recipients being at work.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. But with the Royal Mail increasingly under pressure from falling amounts of “snail mail” and parcels being one of the few areas still booming (due to the increasing amount of internet shopping) you’d think they’d make a special effort to try and deliver them, wouldn’t you?

They even write the little red cards while still at the post office. Saves even more time, and avoids that tricky situation of having someone open the the door while you’re busy writing the card saying that they’re out.

My wife has been at home (mostly) for more than half a year now, caring for a bump and then caring for the baby that it turned into. More than enough time, you would have thought, for the postie to begin to realise that there was a car with a baby seat parked out the front of our house for a reason, and save us the effort of going to collect parcels someone has paid to have delivered to the door.

But, these are hard times, and posties are stretched to do more with less time just like the rest of us. I think what annoys me most is that the existing card that the Royal Mail provide doesn’t cover the actual eventualities faced by it’s post-people, thus forcing them to effectively tell big fat porkies.

We got another “while you were out card” this morning, despite Jane being there all day. Perhaps it should have looked more like this: