"Daddy, can you draw a donkey?"

The passage of time has thankfully seen me refine and improve most of life’s crucial, need-to-master skills so that now – in the role of parent – I can pass this knowledge and experience on to my children. I can help them to read, to write, to add, subtract and divide, to cook, to catch, to appreciate the world around them, to build Lego, to ride their bikes and tie their shoelaces. However, there’s one area of my life where my skills have not progressed in any way since around the age of three; drawing.

I have never been able to draw. My hands are utterly incapable of translating the images in my head on to paper; my cars look like bricks, my trees like forks and my people like grotesquely mutilated genetic accidents. I have no sense of scale or proportion, my faces all look like Sloth from The Goonies and I struggle to remember what basic things look like. So, bizarrely, when my five-year-old daughter asked me whether I can draw a donkey this morning, I heard myself responding; “yes, of course I can,” before accepting a pen and a piece of paper and being greeted by a smiling and expectant face.

There is a 36-year difference between these two pictures!

Looking into the eyes of a little girl who would like nothing more than for her Dad to draw the best picture of a donkey ever, in the world, ever, is a beautiful and terrifying  thing. I didn’t want to disappoint, but I knew that I had about as much chance of successfully penning a donkey as I did of producing a much needed rabbit out of this particular hat. Nevertheless, I gave it a go and began work on my four-legged beast. Of course, we all know what donkeys look like – scruffy-looking miniature horse-like things – but translating that mental image into a physical picture was beyond me.  The result was staggeringly bad. I had managed to draw some kind of dog-horse hybrid and I could tell from my daughter’s lack of words that she was struggling to comprehend my inability to draw such a basic creature.

“Really, Daddy, really? That’s it?”

This was not my finest hour and it was made worse by the fact that, at five, my daughter is developing a real passion for art. She pours over her books on how to draw animals, covering sheet after sheet of paper with colourful flowers, family pictures, lions, giraffes, houses and trees. It’s wonderful to see and the walls of our house are slowly becoming covered with her pictures and portraits as she develops her skills with paints and pencils. Clearly, of course, this talent comes from her mother’s side of the family.

Of course, my own cack-handiness at drawing is not what any of this is actually about. My children are growing into young people who have their own skills, abilities and talents, ones that they will develop and hone over the years and which will serve them well in the future. Whether as artists, writers, footballers, singers, plumbers, hairdressers, racing drivers or musicians, their passions will drive their decision making in regards to school and careers, and I am fascinated to see where this takes them.

When I was their age I remember making my own comic books and magazines for my friends and I ended up working as a journalist, so as my daughter can already outdraw me at age five, perhaps she’s going to create a name for herself as a cartoonist, illustrator or artist.

Fast forward thirty years and, as she’s being interviewed by The Guardian following her latest exhibition of award-winning artwork I can see the pullquote now; “It all started when, aged five, I knew I could draw a better donkey than my Dad.” And if it did, I'll be the proudest incompetent artist on earth!