When I was about ten years old, someone got me and my sister a subscription to a comic each. I got the Beano, she got the Dandy. Each week, we’d trot along to the village newsagent to collect our publication and the ubiquitous “free gift”: usually a lollipop sellotaped to the front cover, but occasionally the big guns would come out and the bored shopkeeper would hand over a plastic bag containing a comic book and a whoopee cushion, or a giant inflatable balloon. My sister and I would swap comics at the end of the week and read each other’s: apparently she secretly preferred my Beano, but never let on.

Not much later, I got a “make your own comic” craft set as a gift – it wasn’t long before I was drawing my own poor imitations of the comic strips I used to read, and persuading my mum to photocopy them for me during quiet moments in her office. I don’t know what audience I thought there was for this schoolboy publication, but it clearly left an impression on me because by the time I reached secondary school a few years later, I was the newly-crowned editor of the hugely-unpopular school magazine, Word4Word.

I used my editorship unwisely, beginning by renaming the magazine Word.com, in what I thought was a masterstroke of relevancy (it was 1999). I also took the bold decision of revamping the “Messages” section (a lonely-hearts style column in the centre spread where students could pay 10p to have a message printed to their crush/friends/enemies): I thought that dotting the individual messages throughout the magazine would encourage people to read all the other great features we had. I’m also pretty sure I commissioned a wildly-inappropriate interview with the son of a teacher who was missing a hand, whose focus was embarrassingly single-minded (or single-handed).

Welcome to issue #52 of Man Feelings – that’s right, it’s been one whole year since I started writing this newsletter, and incredibly, I’ve not missed a single week. I’ve written and sent this thing while on a family holiday to the Canaries, from a field in rural Wales during a festival, while tired and stressed during work, family life and the seemingly-endless six-week holidays.

More importantly, you’ve read it – so thank you! I’m grateful for every reader and I love popping this thing in your inbox every Friday (give or take a day here and there…).

This week’s newsletter is going to be a kind of “year in review” of, well, being a man – and having feelings. When I kicked this project off, I wrote about my goals for it:

“It’s called a devil crab”, the old man told us, plunging his hand into the cloudy bucket. He neatly plucked the crab from its plastic lair and raised it to head height. “Red eyes”, he pointed out helpfully, as the tiny crustacean struggled in his hairy palm. Ted, 5, looked on in fascination. “Dunno what this one is”, the man continued, aware of his rapt—and growing—audience. He pulled a pale-looking crab from the milky water. “Bottom feeder”, he added, as he flipped the shell-dweller upside down to show us its strangely-muscular undercarriage.

We were visiting the famous Cromer Pier, just days after the World Pier Crabbing Championship. From a distance, the pier looked like some kind of bizarre wooden jellyfish: dozens of wispy orange tendrils floated in the sea breeze below its wooden deck, which I realised were the crablines of hopeful fisherfolk. As we got closer, we saw that the entire structure was lined with families, individuals, couples, people old and young – all fervently dangling their lines over the side in the hope of landing a crab.

My five-year-old son has recently started doing things to grab people’s attention. I don’t mean showing off with daredevil feats of physical bravery, or wearing dress-up costumes to public places – he’s been doing that since he was a toddler. No, this is a more specific kind of attention-seeking: he’s trying to be perceived as cool.

It tends to happen around older kids: we’ll be walking past some 10 year olds, and as soon as Ted notices them, he’ll pretend not to look at them while raising his voice to ensure they hear him say “DAD, LET’S USE OUR ELECTRIC BIKE TO RIDE HOME, BECAUSE WE HAVE AN ELECTRIC BIKE AND IT’S REALLY FAST”. It’s equal parts hilarious and crushing to see the kids he’s trying to impress either ignore his efforts or just look at him with bafflement when he quickly glances over to see if they noticed.

This made me think about my own less-youthful efforts at the same thing: trying to be noticed, despite outward appearance. Usually these moments came at pivotal times of change, much like my son is experiencing.

As you read this email, I’ll be experiencing the first day of Green Man festival in Bannau Brycheiniog (the region formerly known as the Brecon Beacons) with my partner and two kids. We’ve been three times before, but only once with a child – doing a festival with two of them is going to be… an experience.

“Festival Matt” isn’t really that different from Regular Matt. I’ve tried wearing novelty hats, but my head is too large for most of them to fit. I’m not cool—or young—enough to stay up all night raving on illegal substances. I’ve walked past the yoga tent at Glastonbury a couple of times, but the bloke wandering around asking if I wanted to go to his “sexology” class tended to put me off.

The first time I went to Green Man, we wandered into a folk music workshop and I made the fatal error of assuming I was destined to become a banjo player. It’s an easy mistake to make: I could already play the guitar, and banjos are tuned to an open chord, meaning that when you strum it, it sounds just like a banjo. Soon you’re picking out the notes for Dueling Banjos and wondering where this five-stringed, drum-skin-bearing instrument has been all your life.