In a recent Speccie column my friend Giles Auty recalled his late father’s difficulties with door handles. This may have puzzled younger readers. When you’re young, after all, everything your parents do and say is a source of shame and embarrassment, so shining any light on it might seem masochistic. But when you get older you find your parents are no more shameful and embarrassing than anyone else’s. And by the time you turn sixty – as I did recently and as Giles evidently did just after the war – you can recall even their most cringe-worthy behaviour with something like affection, especially if there’s a quid in it. And I think I can trump Auty père’s inability to interact with mechanical objects with my own father’s inability to interact with other human beings.

My dad was a nerd in an age when nerds didn’t even have a revenge to look forward to. Today, an affinity with numbers and poor social skills might place a child on ‘the spectrum’, and he or she might be sent to a therapist. But in the 1930s therapist was two separate words and most people thought Asperger’s was something that makes your pee stink. So my dad was sent to Cambridge to study mathematics, a language which exists only in written form. Sadly, he didn’t live to see Russell Crowe make his subject sexy. And since the only other passions of his life were badminton and folk music, two activities which positively discourage bodily contact, I’ve sometimes wondered how I even came about. Were it not for my two siblings I might be tempted to attribute my conception to a miracle of post war austerity; the result of my mother getting into the bathtub immediately after my father had gotten out.

Academia didn’t diminish his shyness, so the high point of my dad’s career was probably a sabbatical term he spent at a Japanese university, where he could chalk symbols quietly on a blackboard all day and wasn’t expected to say anything to anybody. In a letter he wrote to me shortly after arriving he explained that he dealt with phone calls to his campus rooms by reading out a phonetic transcript of the Japanese for: ‘I’m sorry but I only speak English. If this is important, please contact…etc.’.

At the top of this letter he’d been foolish enough to write his new number, so that night I called it, and when he identified himself, I made a short but I hoped polite-sounding statement in cod Japanese. There was a pause, and the rustle of paper, before he began speaking real Japanese in a cautious monotone. I waited until he’d finished before reprising my cartoon Nippon, but louder and with some urgency. He took a few nervous breaths then re-started his script, and this time I interrupted him almost immediately with a burst of Osakan outrage. His breathing was now audible and I could picture him frantically smoothing his crib sheet lest some fold had sabotaged its meaning. He began a third time, spacing each sound carefully and with a discernible quaver in his voice. When he’d finished I exhaled like the brakes on the Shinkansen bullet train making an unscheduled stop, then inhaled just as forcefully, and paused at the top of my breath like a champion skier staring down a Sapporo black run. This gave my father the chance to begin his lines one more time. But what came out now was little more than frightened bleats. So I cut him off again, even more angrily, and when he raised his voice in feeble protest, began roaring into my handset like a demented samurai. I kept this up for 15 or 20 seconds, only stopping to cover the mouthpiece when I couldn’t hold back my laughter any longer.

And when I put the phone back to my ear I heard a language every bit as alien to the mild-mannered middle-aged man I knew as the noises he’d been making.  ‘Look you stupid b-b-bastard,’ he yelled, ‘I don’t speak f-f-f–king Japanese! So just f-f-f-f–k off!!’ Then he slammed the receiver down, and I had to call him back six or seven times before he’d pick it up again. But that’s what devoted children do.