Who's The Daddy: The strange pleasure of letting daughters pick up the bill
I’d read about it, heard it mentioned in passing on a few personal finance videos on YouTube, but I’d never seen it for myself until last Saturday. Our family went out for lunch and our grown-and-flown daughters insisted on paying.
For someone who has always settled the bill, with a nice juicy tip, ever since our twentysomething daughters were babies - this was a lot to take in. It felt like somewhere between a decent win on a scratchcard and a redundancy.
Me, The Boss, Daughter #2 and the boy Walter visited Daughter #1 and The Boyfriend in their swish new flat in the middle of Manchester, with us all going out for a slap-up lunch in lieu of Mother’s Day, which Daughter #2 missed by 24 hours earlier this month because she was flying back from a five-month stint working on the world’s biggest cruise ship in the Caribbean.
It’s hard to recall the last time all of us were in the same room together - I’m guessing October 2025 - so it was quite an occasion. Lunch was ordered, I offered to stump up but Daughter #1 wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would her little sister. It wasn’t quite a Mrs Doyle in Father Ted moment but for a few seconds it was pretty close to it.
They’re both working now with full social lives that would exhaust and terrify me in equal measure (Daughter #1 and The Boyfriend were out in the city centre that night at an event that STARTED at 11pm and got back home AFTER I’d been up and about for an hour) and lunch out on a weekend is standard.
And it was delicious. Even the boy Walter joined in with a couple of sausages which Daughter #2 sliced up and hand fed him at the rate of one every few minutes - a genius move that kept him on his best behaviour and off the table while we ate in peace.
But it’s fair to say that on her return Daughter #2 has struggled with the bracing spring weather of North West England, which despite its rugged beauty, cannot claim to enjoy the sun-drenched climate and the warm, sweet breeze of the Caribbean.
On a trip earlier this week to stay with a mate in Manchester (she can’t keep away) during a biblical rainstorm she said she was dressed like she was off on a Duke of Edinburgh wild camping weekend - my trusty dog walking jacket with a hood and a rucksack packed with essentials.
Put it this way, on her last three tours of duty Daughter #2 never even took a coat. It’s a different world, certainly when it’s not hurricane season.
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