Dads in their eighties

A dad in his 80s this year was born between 1937 and 1946, which puts his teenage years across the 1950s and the 1960s. That is the useful part: a ten-year bracket does not sit inside one decade, so the list below is drawn from both.

At this age the gift is rarely from one person. There are children, grandchildren and often great-grandchildren involved, and somebody has been handed the job of getting it right on behalf of all of them.

That brief gets much easier the moment you drop the idea that it has to be clever. The things that get used are the plain ones: the good blanket, the proper reading light, the radio that works with two buttons, the food he actually likes.

The most common miss. Packaging nobody checked. A present that cannot be opened without scissors and good grip is a present opened by somebody else, in front of everybody, which is a small indignity on his own birthday.

If it is his 80th specifically, that is a different problem · a birthday has a date, and the date changes what works