It was my son’s fifth birthday this week, which immediately gave me reason to suspect we live in some kind of time paradox: I’ve aged at least ten years in the same period.

Kids’ birthday parties at this age are a social minefield: do you have to invite the whole class? Is it a faux pas to hold your child’s party at the same soft play centre everyone went to the week before for a different kid’s birthday? (Yes.) And how do you make conversation with all the strangers you’ve invited to hang out with you for a couple of hours?

Thankfully, years of making desperate chat with tired-looking parents in parks and play areas has steeled me when it comes to small talk with my fellow kid-wranglers. And a clash of birth dates solved the problem of whether we had to invite all the kids in the class. But I still found myself trying to coax my son’s nervous friends onto a trampoline last weekend, urging them to throw dodgeballs at me as they stared uncomprehendingly at their classmate’s weirdly enthusiastic dad.

A few days ago I was playing with my ten month old daughter on the sofa. She’s in a very tactile phase and loves grabbing things—typically my glasses—and swinging them around. She reached over and grabbed the TV remote control and happily waved it around her head.

Suddenly she flicked her hand backwards and whacked the remote into my top lip, swiftly followed by her own head. “ARGH!” I yelped in pained surprise as blood began to pool on my lip. There was a brief pause of complete and total silence, and then she began to howl.

It was my yell of pain: the volume of it, plus its unexpected and angry arrival – she was terrified. She sobbed and shook, her little limbs shaking as tears poured down her face. I pulled her close to me and stroked her little head and spoke soothingly, cursing myself for reacting so strongly (while trying not to bleed on her hair).

As a man of a certain age, I've participated in a few of the rituals of manhood: the stag do, the boys' weekend, the silent drinking of beer before a funeral (maybe this is a Merseyside thing?). Here's my take on them.

The stag do

Even the phrase conjures up equal parts fear and excitement. Statistically, at least one attendee is going to end up drunk and humiliated, doing their duty in friendship to become a good anecdote for the wedding day speeches. If you're worried that it might be you, then it's definitely going to be you.

There are two "hard things" in computer science: cache invalidation, and naming things. After years of experience in software engineering I can vouch for the former, but it's the latter which is truly hard.

In the software world, "naming things" can refer to the challenge of coming up with descriptive-yet-succinct titles for things: a software library, a function name, a variable. It's hard because you need to anticipate how these things may develop in future, and how long they'll persist for. Famously, the HTTP referrer header (which tells websites which previous page you came from) is spelled wrong, and every bit of code since its introduction in 1996 has to handle both the correct and incorrect spelling.

Back in the flesh-and-bone world, though, naming things is equally challenging. I've been responsible for the names of at least four bands, two goldfish, several albums/EPs and, er, a couple of children. All of them were agonising decisions.

The kids are obviously the hardest of all: the weight of responsibility sits heavily as you contemplate all the challenges their name may bring them. Does it rhyme with some insidious playground taunt? Do the initials spell out something rude and embarrassing? Is their future Google ranking dominated by an 18th century serial killer they share a name with? There are plenty of pitfalls to avoid here.

Sometimes I find myself digging through my past to figure out who I am in the present. It feels faintly pointless: what can the 37-year-old me learn from my teenage past? I'm a father to two children, with a job, mortgage and partner. My concerns as a 17-year-old were mainly centered around where I could buy cheap guitar strings, and whether I'd ever pluck up the courage to speak to the girl I fancied in my History class (spoiler: I didn't).

I kept a Livejournal for my teenage years and beyond: for those not of the millennial persuasion, this was an early social network centered around personal blogging. I deleted it a decade ago, of course, but kept a backup and recently resurrected it for old times' sake.

It made for embarrassing reading: I had some pretty ill-informed opinions on things like feminism and gender, and despite thinking I was very self-aware and intellectual at the time, I clearly had little interest in or exposure to anything besides myself. I'll forgive teenagers most of these things, but it was still a sobering read.