Under attack on all sides, what are fathers for?

What is there to be celebrated? What kind of present can have any point? Evidently, nobody knows, including dads themselves.

In life, there are presents that show wonderful, intuitive understanding of the recipient - and there are presents that demonstrate the opposite: baff lement, even disdain.

Almost invariably, the gifts marketed for Father's Day fall into the latter category. One and all, they seem to have been selected to show that men's tastes, so far as they can be comprehended at all, are puerile and ridiculous.

After inspecting the various items on offer in, say, M&S, one can only conclude that some clever and satirical lady has been having malicious fun in the product development department, possibly working off years of resentment at the failings of her own poor pa, or perhaps just of men in general, since pre-history.

The Father's Day Mint Assortment in a Racing Car Tin is a good snicker at male simplicity, as is the Mini-Dominoes and Port Set, two useless little gestures towards relieving stupefied boredom in a single bargain pack.

Dads are a mystery and an embarrassment all round. I come from that generation of men whose fathers, while physically present, in another sense were quite normally almost entirely absent. My father died two years ago and, with him, any chance of changing that.

It would be good to believe that fatherhood is different now. But it is under different pressures. This Government certainly doesn't seem to know what they're for. On the one hand, mothers have just been compelled to name fathers on birth certificates - but the purpose is not to honour fathers but to make it easier for the state to collect more child maintenance from absent ones. On the other, the requirement for fertility doctors to consider a child's need for a father before giving IVF treatment has been abolished, sending a clear message that fathers in general are optional in future. David Cameron voted against this amendment, interestingly.

Fatherhood now is an awkward, uncertain, ill-understood condition, little supported by the law, actively attacked by government; if still at the heart of most families, it is not valued at all in others. Father's Day remains little more than a useful demonstration of our confusion each year. Still, he might just like a zappy new drill? M&S does a fine set of whisky miniatures.

Actually, what he'd really like can neither be bought nor sold.