Do you remember the time before Google Maps? The geospatial dark ages, we might call them.
If you wanted to travel somewhere in the late 1990s, you could put your faith in primitive online navigation sites like Multimap.com, printing out reams of step-by-step directions which may once have accurately resembled the roads in question.
This was once the highpoint of technical wizardry
Alternatively, you could stick to the tried-and-tested AA route planner and road atlas, once a staple of every glove compartment. I remember sitting through my Duke of Edinburgh planning class as a teenager where we learned to use Ordnance Survey maps to plan a route through Derbyshire farmland which would hopefully bring us to a soggy campsite after several hours of confused hiking. Is this a lost art?
Maybe I experienced a premonition, or maybe I’m just naturally nosy. Either way, I had a feeling that the van was going to hit my car.
Seconds after disaster
I think I was expecting a delivery when I noticed the large white van manoeuvring outside the house. I walked to the window and was surprised at the unusual angle the driver had wedged their vehicle into. Sometimes the Amazon delivery guys park at a 45 degree angle on the pavement while they jump out to make a delivery, but this guy looked like he was trying to reverse back out again. Hmm, if he carries on at that speed he’s going to hit—
Benji pointed out how the article doesn’t make a single reference to LGBTQ culture, and Pete posted a great thread breaking down his feelings about the piece: “I find it scary and disconcerting, a bit like visiting a deeply conservative town and realising you don't belong.”
This is what Google Images thinks “British Culture” is, and who am I to argue.
Let’s be clear: it’s a frothy, light-hearted listicle that’s jumping on the Very British Problems meme train several years after it left the station.
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.
This could still be yours, for just £4.99 on eBay
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…).
Your humble author on his way to Tenerife, thinking “Did I remember to schedule Man Feelings?”
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:
