I sat down to write this week’s newsletter with the intention to discuss Trump’s victory. It’s the biggest news story all year and will materially affect the lives of most people reading this for years to come.

But you don’t want to hear about this from me (or anyone), I suspect. As I walked through the supermarket this lunchtime I passed the newspaper stand, which was filled with orange closeups of the new president-elect. I felt a sudden urge to give the finger to an inanimate object, frustrated that his victory had somehow followed me into “the real world” outside of screens.

There are some days at work when nothing gets done because of the news agenda. I remember the deaths of both David Bowie and Prince causing the downing of tools for most of those days while we talked about their legendary output and listened to their work. Trump’s first election victory was another day like this, but the novelty was still around then: what was this guy actually going to do in office? This time around, we already know.

So I don’t want to fill your inbox with more doomscrolling about how awful things are going to be. This sucks, it’s a terrible outcome even for the people who voted for him, and you already know all this. Instead I’ll leave the last word on this to my musical hero Ted Leo, who wrote an entire album about the awfulness of the Bush administration back in 2004 (god, how quaint and mild it now seems). The title track from that album, Shake The Sheets, runs thus:

Sorry for the delayed arrival of this week’s Man Feelings. I’ve just got back from a week in Portugal with the family (it’s half term) and I was in no fit state to write an email when we got home on Friday afternoon.

The theme of this week’s missive, then, is… going on holiday. Here are some Portuguese vignettes.

Why did we do this to ourselves?

I’ve written here before about me being a stressful traveller. It’s taken me a while to accept this label: when I’ve travelled abroad solo for work trips I’ve been prompt, organised, on time and well-prepared. The notion that I could be a “bad traveller” is one I bristled at when Maddy gently suggested it to me. But I’ve come to accept, after this recent trip, that perhaps in the context of transporting two kids from A to B, I’m not very good.

Parenting a school-age kid is a weird experience of confusion, bureaucracy and misinformation. You’re left at the mercy of multiple, non-interoperable IT “platforms” to do things as basic as pay for your kid’s milk, and unable to persuade the child in question to give you even the slightest insight about what they’ve been doing there all day.

It’s a black box of education: you drop them off in the morning, stuff happens for eight hours, then you collect them again, clothes stained with paint/food/bodily fluids, with a line drawing of a classmate doing a poo as the only thing to show for it.

This mystifying experience, perhaps, was what led me to wrongly accuse one of my five-year-old son’s teachers of poor support for his literary development, in the course of an otherwise-innocuous Parents’ Evening earlier this week.

I’ve lived in ten different houses since leaving my family home back in 2005. This averages out at a move almost once a year for the first decade, as I rotated through student houseshares in Leeds and then the London rental shitshow with my partner. We’ve been in our current home for almost seven years now and it’s almost strange to contemplate moving again.

I moved house a few times as a child too, including a big relocation from Merseyside to Nottingham when I was five years old as my parents decided to start a new life on the other side of the country from their family and friends. Now I’m the parent of a five year old myself, I struggle to imagine what that must have been like for them, especially in the days where you couldn’t just join the WhatsApp group for your kid’s new school and get to know the local parents. Does this mean people had to go and talk to each other?!

As safe as houses

Yesterday evening, just before we started to round the kids up for bed, my five year old son Ted uncharacteristically curled up on the sofa in silence. He sat there hugging his knees while we tidied away the remains of dinner, and it soon became clear he was concerned about something.

He wouldn’t tell us what it was because he was worried we’d tell him off, so we let him go to bed and didn’t push the issue: it’d come out when he felt able to tell us.

This morning, we heard the full story:

At school that day, he bumped into another kid who apparently “loves killing bugs”. Ted suggested to the other boy that he should, er, eat a woodlouse alive. “Because that would kill it too,” Ted explained to us.