Before my son started school, he went to nursery on the campus of the University of Birmingham where my partner works. When collecting him I’d sometimes take the scenic walk through campus which was always filled with irritatingly young-looking students having fun with their carefree lives (not that I felt bitter). Sometimes I’d look at what they were wearing and feel perplexed to see them basically in the same kind of clothes me and my friends wore 20 years ago. 

It’s quite a hit to the ego to realise you’re old enough for fashion to have come full circle again, but I also remember kidding myself that I could pass for a student. Not because I look particularly youthful (two kids will see to that), but because I still basically dress like I did a decade or so ago. Black jeans, trainers, and a t-shirt/hoodie combo. If I’m feeling like I need to “make an effort” I might stretch to a plaid shirt or, very occasionally, a cardigan.

Why am I writing about this? Because I don’t really know how to dress, and I’m worried that I’m too close to 40 now to get away with dressing like I’m 20. But I don’t know many men my age who seem to have a handle on this, either. Men, how do you dress?!

A decade or so ago, I got myself into what I believe the youth call “Twitter beef” when I called out a tech conference happening in London with an all-male speaker lineup. I posted a ranty tweet and a blogpost, then went to bed. I woke up the next morning to some understandably angry responses from the conference organisers, an invitation to appear on Woman’s Hour, and, eventually, international media coverage.

I learned a lot of things in the aftermath, including about right-to-reply, accurate use of statistics, and media scheduling challenges (I never did make it onto Radio Four). So I was a bit surprised to see essentially the same thing happen again this week with a conference whose organiser, um, invented fictional women speakers to avoid creating the dreaded “manel”.

I saw this story covered on the venerably ancient tech news blog Slashdot, which has a userbase of grumpy sysadmins who fear change. The prevailing opinion amongst the below-the-line commenters there was: why should the software industry keep pandering to women when they clearly don’t want to work in programming?

I’m not going to bother rehearsing the well-known rebuttals or even engaging with this fatuous argument: it belongs in the past (much like Slashdot itself; I’m not sure why I still read it). But it struck me that some people still really do believe that there are, well, boy jobs and girl jobs.

I’ve been flat this week. Struggling to kick a winter cold, which can always be an energy-sapper, and also going a little stir-crazy. I normally work from home for 3 or 4 days per week, and go to the office for the remainder. My company is moving offices, though, so we’ve been without a space for the month of November. Despite being a mega introvert and enjoying my own space, I’ve found myself struggling a lot as the weeks go on.

Some of this is just the reality of the home-as-workplace setup. When you hover between your professional and personal spaces, you never properly exist in either of them. When I go downstairs to make a coffee, I’m thrust into the world of parenting a nearly-six-month-old and feel guilty for not helping out while I’m in between calls. Then ten minutes later I’m on a quarterly planning call and can hear the baby crying downstairs, or the four year old home from school and charging around the house dressed as a pirate. 

My response to this challenge was perhaps a classic man trait: try to ignore it or power through, until I get overwhelmed by it all and have to just drop everything and get out of the house. A few nights ago I chucked the baby in the pram at 6pm and wandered off to the supermarket for a completely pointless trip where I didn’t need anything… except to leave the house and look at some different scenery for half an hour.

It’s my tenth issue of Man Feelings, and I’m very proud of sustaining this thing for ten weeks in a row. Today is also International Men’s Day—yep, you thought it was just a meme, didn’t you?—which is definitely why this newsletter is a couple of days late. Let’s get into it!

A prize just for showing up?

Why do men need a dedicated day? It’s a bit like the classic response to “why isn’t there a “White History Month”? – eg. because every other month is dedicated to history written by white people. Likewise, a dedicated day for men seems to only exist because self-entitled misogynists complain when they hear about International Women’s Day. What are we supposed to do on November 19th? Make a big fuss of men, just for showing up?

I’m a huge Beatles fan. I blame my dad: our family are from Merseyside where the Beatles are even more ubiquitous than everywhere else, and every car journey was accompanied by a blast through the #1s CD (it was quite a lot later in life before I heard an actual Beatles album, but that’s another story). It was inevitable that I was going to be a fan.

Men love nostalgia, too. All these Facebook groups about “proper binmen”; grown men watching their favourite childhood cartoons (yes, I’m guilty too); or perhaps just groups of guys hanging out and reminiscing about schoolday pranks and semi-legendary figures from the shared past. Why do we like living in the past?

One man who’s been doing a lot of that lately is Sir Paul McCartney. The Beatles’ last-ever song, Now and Then, has just reached #1 in the charts, 54 years after their last big hit. Macca’s still got it! But the song is definitely looking backwards.