There was a pub we used to drink at when I was on the cusp of 18 (and technically not allowed to be there) called the Old Angel, in the centre of Nottingham. Back then it was a rock/metal pub, though it looks to have rebranded as a microbrewery in the intervening twenty years. We’d finish classes at sixth form and walk over there for a burger, chips and a pint. It was 2004 and it felt like we had all the time in the world, with our baggy jeans and dyed hair.

My teenage band used to play gigs there: it was pay-to-play and we literally handed out paper flyers to likely-looking strangers in Nottingham city centre to try to earn enough door money to pay for the old, grumpy sound guy who’d grudgingly run the PA for the night while we performed, for something like £50 and a couple of Kronenbourgs. The stage was tiny, but incredibly, the venue played host to genuine touring bands as well as small-timers like us, so we were able to say we’d shared a stage with the big-name artists, despite being technically a vanity gig.

The bird shit landed on my outstretched hand, describing a perfect semicircle of recently-airborne faeces around my fingers. At this late stage of the day I actually found myself laughing at, rather than cursing my unseen avian assailant. Shit happens.

It was 6pm this Tuesday and I was late for an event I was supposed to be hosting. Delayed trains and school pickups were my weak excuses, and I walked out of the train station to see my intended tram disappear into the sunset (well, the cloud of noxious fumes surrounding Birmingham New Street). I needed a plan B.

“What about an e-bike?”, I definitely didn’t say out loud. I used to regularly hire one of the green-and-purple cycles dotted around Birmingham when I was doing the nursery dropoff last year. I found a likely-looking bike and held my phone over the contactless docking point.

I pulled the ticket out of my pocket and showed it to the worried-looking official standing outside the auditorium doors. “The support act is on right now”, she told me. “You’ll have to wait by the side till the song finishes”.

I’d forgotten that this was a seated concert. She pulled the heavy doors open for me and I crept inside, only to be quickly intercepted by another concerned official who ushered me to some temporary seating “until the support act finishes”.

I sat and took in my surroundings. The venue was Birmingham Symphony Hall, somewhere I’d been a couple of times for orchestral performances, but never for a folk-rock gig. I was here to see guitar virtuoso Richard Thompson (of Fairport Convention fame). I craned my neck to the stalls to get a sense of where my seat was, and was momentarily blinded by the glare of the stage lights reflecting off the bald heads of six hundred retired folk music blokes.

“Only girls like unicorns”, my five-year-old son Ted told me confidently as we walked to the park. He elaborated, explaining the gendered “rules” he had already become aware of in his nine months of full-time school. He’d presumably forgotten about the unicorn bell decorating his bike, which he’d specifically asked for at the end of last year.

Like a good progressive parent, I challenged him: “what if I said only people with brown hair like Paw Patrol? Would that make sense?” I tried, which of course shifted things into a discussion about the likes and dislikes of his school friend who has ginger hair. Once again, I regretted embarking on an intellectual debate with a child.

Where does this stuff creep in? We don’t teach him to isolate his interests based on his gender, and presumably neither do his teachers. “Kids will be kids”, you could say, and yes, school-age children exist on clearly-demarcated lines around things like age and gender. At this point I think it’s better to just question his assumptions and leave it at that: trying to force his opinion proves nothing.

I’ve only ever stood in one election in my life, and I didn’t win.

It’s 2007 and I’ve just joined the student newspaper at university. A guy I vaguely know from lectures already works on the paper, and he’s standing for the position of Editor in the upcoming student union elections. I’m a lonely second-year student who’s feeling distant from his housemates, and decide to respond to the call-out for campaign support. I show up at the pub one night to help my friend with his marketing strategy.

I learned a lot: it turns out that students don’t really go for gonzo-inspired posters (Hunter S. Thompson, Che Guevara and Andy Warhol were perhaps cooler touchpoints in the 1960s than the early 2000s), and I also discovered that I was living in blissful ignorance of campus politics until this point. “I’ve got the J-Soc vote”, my candidate friend assured me, and I had to discreetly ask around until I realised this meant the Jewish society, whose bloc vote was as fiercely contested as that of PSG – the Palestinian Solidarity Group.