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.

This is technically last week’s newsletter because I was on holiday in the sunny climes of Tenerife for all of last week. I toyed with trying to write that week’s edition on my phone and send it out on Friday, but found myself chasing a four year old around Europe’s biggest waterpark instead – so here’s a Monday edition of Man Feelings. Onwards!

I was feeling some trepidation about the travelling part of the holiday. Two kids (a four month old and a four year old), four suitcases, multiple bags, and my mum along for the trip too. I tend to get a bit anxious/stressed before big trips like this, because I like to avoid surprises and be hyper-organised. Travel, of course, never goes exactly as planned, and I’m still not very good at handling this.

We’d hired a special pushchair for the baby which transformed into a car seat, which I was feeling very smug about literally until a few minutes before we headed out of the door to get the train to the airport. I’d practised folding the pram up, practised installing it in a car using seatbelts, and tagged it with a little toy bee so we’d know it was ours. The only thing I’d forgotten to do, however, was practice putting the baby in it. Turns out she was too big for it with all her cold-weather gear on and she howled the house down minutes before we were about to leave as we struggled to fit her into it.

Welcome to the seventh edition of this newsletter – thanks for taking the time to read it. I should take a moment to call out a great comment on a previous edition—Being a “fixer” of problems—by my close friend Tsering. He’s challenged some of my thinking about what men should (or shouldn’t) do in these situations, and I encourage you to go and read his take! But don’t forget to come back here afterwards and read this edition, too.

Tears at bedtime

Crying is something I rarely used to do. It’s not that the classic “boys don’t cry” advice permeated my subconscious: it’s more that I didn’t often find myself experiencing emotions to the degree that it ended in tears (or perhaps began with them).