I had a plaintive phone call from my 13 y.o. granddaughter, complaining bitterly that her dad, or YOUR son, as she contemptuously dismissed him, had made her look like a dork, would I please chastise him?
It materialised that she had arranged to go to the library, to study some school project with a 13 y.o. male classmate and had asked her dad to let the kid wait in their house, if he arrived before she was back from shopping with her mother.
My son had told the kid that he’d got the wrong address, no Francesca lived there.
When I queried this with my son, he said that the boy had turned up wearing a New York Mets T shirt and ball cap, perfectly acceptable to anyone, but that he was wearing tracky bottoms.
My kid said, “Let’s be fair dad, I wasn’t going to let my daughter be seen in the street with someone wearing those, that’s social ignominy equivalent to being seen buying The Sun.”
I felt that I couldn’t argue against that, so I told my granddaughter that in this case, dad knew best.