This is the first time I have written a column here since my father died. I had rather thought, when it happened, that I wouldn't do one again. That it would be disrespectful to have his name - Coren - appear on the op-ed pages of The Times, and it be somebody other than him. Some impostor.

I worried that sturdy chaps in the Home Counties - chaps who were perhaps on holiday when he died, never saw the obits, just assumed he was having a rest - would hear on the grapevine that Coren was back and turn greedily to the comment pages, thinking the Sage of Cricklewood was here again with his magic bag of wossnames, narmeans, impossibly long first sentences and talking animals with extreme opinions about community policing, and be terribly, terribly disappointed that it was only me.

And then there was the problem that writing anything now, knowing that he isn't going to read it, seems strangely pointless. He just thought I was the best. Everything I wrote was, to him, brilliantly observed, hilarious, a return on the punitively priced education he wrote most of his words in the 1980s to pay for. A good joke from his public school-educated son about the Battle of Maldon or Milton's unpublished limericks, was, to him, terrific value for money.

But who else gives a toss? Who else is going to phone me every Saturday morning around 9am (first expressing surprise that I am asleep and thus missing the best part of the day) and tell me I'm brilliant? And then, when I say “review or column?”, reply: “both”, and list the jokes he particularly likes, and ask if I wrote about eating poached pigs' brains specifically so as to put him off his breakfast?

My mother will call, of course (it was often she who called before, but there was always him in the background shouting, “Tell him I did that joke in Punch 30 years ago!”), and I'm not saying that impressing her is any less important. But my mother was impressed by tiny poos I left in the potty 36 years ago. She's not what you'd call a tough crowd. And, for all her qualities, she's not the funniest columnist who ever lived. She's not the person I think of every time I write a sentence, and wonder if he'd have done it differently, funnier, better, or just the same.

So I thought I'd just stop. It made me teary-eyed to think of the sombre way in which I would tell the Editor of The Times that I was hanging up my column as a mark of respect for my dead father. It would be a manly and moving thing, like when they retired Maradona's No 10 shirt.

But then last week my mother phoned because she couldn't make the lawnmower work. The grass has started growing again for the first time since he died, and he couldn't abide an untidy lawn. So when the gardener failed to show up she decided, for the first time in 45 years, to mow it herself. But she didn't know about the “dead man's handle” safety feature. Only the dead man knew. And me.

So I went round, pressed the button to release the dead man's handle on the dead man's lawnmower, and began to mow.

Now, my father was a tidy man and always mowed perfect stripes in his lawn. Looking out of the big, arched landing window in Cricklewood, I used to watch him on Saturday mornings with his shirt off, in his Wrangler jeans, pushing the big old two-stroke rotary mower up and down, up and down, stopping to fill the tank occasionally, sometimes hitting a pebble and swearing loudly, and then going back over the ruined stripe to make it straight.

So I was aware of the pressure to perform. To mow as well as he used to. As I pushed his mower up and down his lawn I realised my mother was watching me. I dropped the lever and called to her, over the whiz of the fading blades: “I can hear him now shouting, ‘You call that a f****** stripe?'.” And she said, “No, he'd be very pleased.”

So there's the thing. I didn't do it all that well. I didn't do it the way he would have done. The stripes were a bit wobbly, and I might have scalped the turf in a couple of places. But the lawn got mowed. And the mower got put back in his shed where it belongs. And I decided I might as well start writing the column again.

Obviously, he won't be phoning me this morning. But that's cool. I know what he'd say if he did. He'd say: “I read the piece, Jig. It's great. Good joke about the potty. But leave out the mawkish stuff now. They pay you to be funny.”

Times Recommends

• Never believe Demjanjuk is a ‘victim’
• A strong City is not just good for Britain
• Class warrior ready for one last battle