It's sunny outside so of course I’m inside playing video games. I am 32, I know better, I know that endless summers are a mirage, I know that the heat-haze we all saw rise from the roads of our childhood were here for a day and no more. Back then I’d stay indoors and play video games because I thought summer would last forever, the curtains closed because tomorrow would be another blazing lazy day of heat to run around in.

I am 32. I know that autumn comes and that rain and cloud and being inside locked in an office all day is the real reality of an adult life. If I’d known that back then would I have gone outside just a bit more? Would I have followed my Father’s advice to ‘go and have a run around, it’ll be too late when you are grown up’? No. No I wouldn’t, I’d still have defended camels and painted-up posters and raced around the corridors of mysterious space freighters. Fields and sun and trees to climb were fine but the runs my mind went for instead were like blitzed-out marathons of imagination.

But he was right, my Dad, I should have taken-up the sun’s rare offer of more blissful days out by the river. That I didn’t was the first sign of a separation between him and me. That and the fact I could beat him at every game I owned. There was not a single space-fight, or car race, or pirate trade he could better me in. I was his superior in these things which to him didn’t matter. They were my world and my friends lived there too, they could beat me, some of them, but we owned the Earth and the distant moons and the places only we could get to with our daylight dreams of sprites and scrolling and primary colour.

Dad had a little cottage on a river in the Cotswolds. We would stay there some weekends. Dad wanted to entertain in the garden one hot sunny day in 1979. He wanted to open the French doors so the host could swish-in and out with pineapple chunks on sticks and with avocado dips. The key fairy had other ideas and had taken the three-lever chunky lock turner and hidden it. I watched my Dad wrestle with that lock, trying to pick it or dismantle it, for hours and hours. On the telly Why Don’t You had done a ‘street crime special’ that summer which included advice on breaking and entering, including some neat tips on lock picking. I’d practiced, I knew how to do it and I knew I could unlock those French doors and save the day.

Dad wouldn’t let me try. I was nine, how could I possible do what a grown-up could not? Each time I asked to have a go Dad would tell me ‘no’. By the fifth time he really shouted and I got the message. Later Dad, still fighting and swearing under his breath, was called upstairs to sort something more urgent out. A blocked toilet as I recall. Seeing my chance I took a coat hanger out of my wardrobe and bent it as the scruffy little Northern Irish street urchins on telly had told me to do. Without really understanding what was happening I pushed the satanic wire-doll into the keyhole. A twist, an oiled click and ‘chunk’ the door popped open an inch.

He returned. Saw the door open and the coat hanger lying among his failed tools. He said nothing, just packed away his tool box and put them back in the shed. He knew something had changed between Father and Son and so did I.

I began to better him at other things too. It frightened me then and it still does today, that we all eventually become parents to our parents. At first it is small things, being able to kick a ball more accurately, to wield a joystick better, to understand a concept in French that he abandons. Then it becomes larger, more important things, to know our work better than him, to make real some of the dreams he had for himself, to become parents to children of our own. We are the generation who own video games, our children will take them and better them and will build bridges back to us with them. My daughter Rosy is 12, she knows the runs in SSX Tricky better than I do and can help me to complete characters I can’t quite make the grade with. I like that, it connects us. It divided my Dad and me. We own video games, they are the unique feature of our class of ’82, of ’83, or ’99, or 2003 but not for the class 0f 1962. Let them have the Beatles and free-love and jungle wars, we’ll take Parappa The Rapper, Leisure Suit Larry and Metal Slug instead.

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