Very occasionally, not often, someone will mention or ask about my Dad. “You know”, I usually say, “since the day he died, there hasn’t been a single day” – and here I pause for comic effect – “that I’ve missed him”.

Sometimes – again not often thankfully – I dream about him, and I wake with gritted teeth, consumed by contempt and anger. I imagine a heavy object in my hand. I introduce it, in my mind, to his greasy, ignorant, flabby gargoyle face, with no small degree of force. And I comfort myself by remembering that he’s dead.

Firstly I must be clear; he wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t an abuser, at least in the most egregious sense. No, he was an imbecile. A weak, pathetic, unpleasant little man; an embarrassment. I’ve thought about writing this piece for a long time, always decided against it until now but I’ve finally come to the view that he deserves to be remembered, if he’s remembered at all, for what he was. Actually I can feel a certain catharsis already, as I type this.

His name was Frank William Gibbon. He was born in 1920, in Shildon, County Durham. He was a marine engineer, then eventually a draughtsman at Steetley Magnesite in Hartlepool.

It occurred to me recently that I’m roughly the same age that he was when I embarked on my degree course, as a mature student. And – quite honestly – I congratulated myself on being so very different from my father at that age. I retired early on my own terms, I wasn’t made redundant. I’m not overweight. I don’t spend every evening slouched in an armchair, drinking the cheapest whisky I can find at the local off licence until I’m semi-comatose. I don’t sneer “nig pig” when a black face appears on a television screen or slur a comically brain-dead opinion every five minutes after the first four or five glasses of Scotch. I don’t radiate a scent of stale body odour blended with alcohol fumes and Brylcreem. And I can read a book with my mouth closed.

Here’s one of my defining memories of my father.

My bedroom was directly above the living room where the slovenly idiot spent every late evening on his own after my mum had retired to bed, slurping and gulping his cheap paint stripper whisky, staring blankly at a television set and slumped on an armchair or settee like a huge, malodorous slug. For five days of the week I’d have to get up early the following morning, to travel to Teesside Poly. He’d have the TV on far too loud; I think because he was drunk. I think that if you choose to experience the world around you through a fog of alcohol, it helps to have the volume up.

Time after time I’d ask him to turn it down. Please. And sometimes he did, but he’d always just turn it up again. Very often I’d be lying there trying to sleep until the TV was emitting the persistent BEEEEEEP that indicated that the network had closed down for the night. Sometimes this was accompanied by the muffled sound of snoring radiating upward through my bedroom floor. So I’d go down to wake the worthless slob. I’d nudge or shake him and as he recovered consciousness with his characteristic brain-dead, intoxicated, wide-eyed vacant stare, he’d slur “whhwaatsh…yuphlblmm”. He was trying to say “what’s your problem?” For some reason this was his go-to response to being woken from self-induced unconsciousness. His other one was “EH?”.

As I type this I can feel that same contempt, that same loathing I felt in my twenties. I can feel that same imaginary heavy object in my right hand. I only wish I could make him read this. Frank, you deserve to be remembered this way.

During the week of my finals in 1989, I asked if he could please – please – knock off the late night loud TV sessions, just for a few days. Just until I’d got through my exams. Of course not. Fortunately we had a caravan parked on the drive so I went to sleep in there until my exams were over, to escape my anti-social parent. As I took my books and a sleeping bag out there I heard the worthless oxygen thief shouting “PATHETIC IDIOT”, behind me.

I’m so glad to have written this. In coming weeks and months I will extend this piece with more memories of the arsehole who was my father.