When I turned 18 years old, I received a razor in the post. It was a marketing campaign by Gillette to congratulate me on "becoming a man", even though I'd been shaving for years by the time I opened it. I also seem to remember receiving a birthday card from the local Tory MP, given there was a general election coming up soon. (I didn't vote for him.)

The present I was actually excited about was a new electric guitar: my second, slightly more grown-up instrument (which I still play today). This was the gift I requested when my parents asked if I wanted driving lessons.

I grew up in a small village miles from anywhere. If you wanted to head into the "big city" (Nottingham, 15th most populous city in the UK) it was nearly an hour on an expensive, infrequent bus. All my friends lived a few miles away on the other side of a steep valley. In many ways, then, it was a bad decision of mine not to opt for driving lessons.

In the "festive perineum" between Christmas and New Year, there's a lot of time to kill. Alas, I was in charge of a four year old, whose appetite for sitting down quietly with a book is famously limited. I was desperate, therefore, to encourage him to play with his Christmas present.

A year ago, I got him his first "real" bike, eg. one with pedals and brakes. He'd been happily scooting along on his balance bike since he was twenty months old, and the received wisdom is that kids who learn to ride a balance bike can skip the stabiliser stage entirely and graduate straight to a pedal bike.

As a cycling-mad dad, I was excited for this to happen. I bought him the yellow bike he craved and we went out for a test ride this time last year – after a little persuasion from me, he was able to ride solo, while constantly shouting at me not to let go.

Every man has a drawer or box full of old cables and electronics, right? I hate to stereotype, but I'm also reasonably confident that every man reading this (and let's be fair, quite a few women too) will have a tangled mess of old USB charging cables, adapters, probably an ancient phone or two, and old batteries, if you have kids.

I've moved house so many times now (ten times since leaving home in 2005) that I've accumulated several of these boxes of treasures, accumulating more of them as my technology became obsolete. In a musty-smelling cardboard box somewhere lies my old iPod, purchased in 2006 using my student loan (don't read this part, mum) and still festering because I couldn't bring myself to throw it away.

There are dozens of weird adapters for every conceivable need: not just your various flavours of USB (come on, this is entry-level stuff), but all kinds of arcane audio/video converters, upscalers and extenders. There are gadgets I briefly thought I needed (an HDMI splitter, a universal remote control, a soundbar) and all kinds of orphaned power supplies, their parent device now long-gone.

Why do we do this? What scenario are we planning for where there's suddenly a desperate need for a 3.5mm audio jack adapter so someone can plug their bluetooth speaker into a toaster?

We tried watching The Bear at the start of this year after hearing good things, but my partner Maddy got fed up with the intensity of the kitchen scenes and didn’t enjoy it. Fast forward to this week, and the Guardian have named it TV show of the year. Maddy suddenly wanted to watch it again…

Three more episodes and it took me back to my youth working as a dishwasher in a large (200+ covers) Cantonese restaurant in suburban Nottingham. I spent the latter part of my teenage years working Friday and Saturday nights there, washing dishes for £50 cash each week. My best friend Nathan worked with me and between us we saved enough cash for our teenage band—Doomed Youth—to record our debut EP at a local studio.

Now obviously washing dishes isn’t the same as the drama of The Bear, and as far as I know nobody shot themselves or spiked soft drinks with Xanax at a children’s party. But it made me think about what a masculine space the kitchen I worked in was. There were no female chefs, and only a couple of women who worked in front-of-house (my sister among them). It was ugly, physical work: we finished each shift covered in grease, water and sweat… but fifty quid richer.

I was getting my hair cut this week and the barber was making small talk as he negotiated my sideburns. We were talking about children and their chaotic injuries, and I mentioned my son’s space hopper/slide injury (see a previous Man Feelings for the full tale). He went on to relate some incredible stories of his childhood with his dad teaching him to ride a bike by seating him on it then letting him roll down a steep hill, and another one involving his friends climbing onto a shed roof to imitate an action film and one of them falling and breaking a collarbone. 

I laughed as he told the stories and it made me think of all the similar tales from my own youth. Granted, I was mostly the sensible/boring one who stood on the sidelines watching while a friend did something ill-advised, but I still had plenty of examples come to mind. Here’s a couple:

It’s 2006 and my friends and I are all 20 years old and bored during the summer break from university. My friend, who I’ll identify as MP, asked if we wanted to go to his house “to smash some stuff up with a sledgehammer”. I should note that this friend is one of the cleverest, most able people I know, but he also has a streak of daredevil/thrillseeker which is perhaps what led us to the following moment: