There are many pains we all endure in this vale of tears. I wondered once if I would ever recover from the disorientating physical trauma I felt on waking at 5am after a night spent comparing bison grass vodkas with pepper, lemon and cherry varieties in the company of this paper's Washington correspondent. I now know why biological warfare is outlawed under the Geneva Convention. My liver felt like Gruinard Island - exposed to the most toxic combination of chemicals known to man and now incapable of sustaining life.

Next to that I suppose I have to rank the wrenching pain in the pit of my stomach when I received the building society's revaluation report on my home and realised I was now deeper underwater than a flounder in the Marianas Trench.

But, wrenching as these ordeals have been, I still think the profoundest pain I have ever felt is the pain of childhood embarrassment. No wound is ever quite as scorching as the hot flush of reddening cheeks a child feels when a parent does something ineffably naff. And it is impossible to escape embarrassing your children. It's what parents are for. Our clothes, our jokes, our breath, our hair, are all, inevitably, going to let the side down.

Now, when I look back on own my childhood and reflect on how my teeny pretensions were brought up short in front of my friends by my parents' down-to-earthness I do sometimes wonder if I wasn't just altogether too precious about these things. Was I just another shallow, ungracious Pip, worried about the impression Joe Gargery creates?

But now that I am a parent, Joe Gargery myself, I am becoming all too well aware of the massive range of embarrassments I am capable of visiting on my children. My unpunctuality used to be my problem, which I occasionally inflicted on others. Now it has become a trauma I inflict on my daughter, as the agony of arriving at school after the bell has gone shows her up in front of her friends The rust-brown cord jacket I wear at the school gate, the fact that I don't look like Zac Ephron, the habit I have of reading hardback books while in the playground, the scratched Skoda I park next to the other parents' showroom-fresh cars, all used to be matters of supreme irrelevance to me. Now, I realise, they are all ways in which I undermine my daughter's coolness. And I am becoming more and more aware of my grotesque unfashionability, just as my daughter is becoming more and more aware of how these things matter in the culture we have all created. What once were mere eccentricities on my part are now social depth charges, as I sail on regardless my actions leave havoc in my wake, the reverberations and damage affecting all those around me.

I have just two consolations as I realise that I am now well on my way to becoming a cross between Frank Spencer and the father Geoffrey Palmer played in Butterflies. One is that embarrassing dads have always inspired great literature - from Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion to the works of Alan Bennett - we naff fathers are rich sources of comedy. The second is that, having embarrassed my daughter by going public (in these pages) on the traumas of getting a puppy for the children, the hottest dad on the planet has now followed suit.

Mutt for the mutt

I know that Barack will be inundated with advice at the moment. And I know that serious times need serious people to say serious things. But as a fellow politician with two children who has acquired a puppy only after being elected to public office I feel I'm in a unique position to counsel the President-elect on this key appointment to his White House Team.

I know the problems he's facing. He has one daughter prone to allergies (check). He'd like a street mutt instead of an expensive pedigree chum (check). He's all too conscious that when the mutt needs feeding and the poops need scooping he'll be off saving the world somewhere (almost check - my reasons for absence from pooper-scooper duty are a little more prosaic.)

So my advice to Barack is do what we did - and get a Jack Russell/whippet mongrel. It's a very Anglo choice - reaffirming the special relationship. Its also a progressive pick. The Jack Russell is a Whig dog - named after the great reforming Victorian premier. And whippets are, in every sense, a workers' animal. Our own dog, Mars, is affectionate, resilient and loyal. And if the President-elect knows anything it's that there won't be many appointees who have all those virtues standing by him every step of the way over the next eight years.

Rude awakening

In these pages just last week my wife wrote, persuasively, that one of the delights about staying in was drinking Louis Latour Aloxe-Corton and being drip-fed Rococo chocolate almonds. Which makes me wonder.

Just whom has she been staying in with?

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