Christmas with Captain Obvious

Driving anywhere with my father, Captain Obvious is always an experience.

An experience, in the way Chinese water torture is an experience.

The kind of experience that leaves permanent scarring on your psyche.

Christmas Day, I spent most of the day incarcerated in an innocent looking Holden Combo van being subjected to the psychological torture that is Captain Obvious.

We had decided to visit my family in Forster, and my Dad, in a seemingly kind gesture had offered to drive me there, and the first couple of hours, were actually reasonably pleasant. I should have been suspicious at this point, I should have known he was lulling me into a false sense of security. I should have chosen to travel on the roof racks instead. At about the half way point I posted on Facebook:

"2 1/2 hrs in the car with my Dad and no patricidal urges, must be a Christmas miracle!"

Alas, with one tiny unassuming little post, I had jinxed it. It was like he had seen that I was not writhing in mental anguish, taken it as a challenge and run with it.

He began the torture with a light game of Eye-Spy, in time he grew impatient with this and began to read the street signs.

All of them.

Out loud.

In the manner of a child learning to read.

For an hour!

It was enough to drive me up the wall or at least it would have been if cars had walls. Calmly, I loosened the grasping finger-hold I had on my sanity just long enough to reach inside my bag, retrieve my iPhone and pop on some tunes to drown out the incessant babble. I was just getting into the groove, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a fraction of a second too late, clawing fingertips reefing the cable of my headphones out of the phone. The dulcet tones of Dashboard Confessional being coarsely rent to be replaced most abruptly with the grating voice of the Father-Creature, intentionally flat, screeching out "I know a song that will get on your nerves".

Never has a truer word been spoken.