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:

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.