Sailors, structures and serenity

V S Pritchett: great insights on maturing men

V S Pritchett is one of the great underrated English story tellers: he is brilliant at evoking characters, drawing out the emotions woven through everyday life. His short stories are especially good, and I was impressed by one I read recently, simply called The Sailor.

In this story, the narrator describes how he meets and befriends a shabby middle-aged man who is lost in London. He turns out to be Albert Thompson, a ship’s cook, invalided out of the service two years before.

“Off a ship?” I said.
He looked at me as if I were a magician who could read his soul. “Thank Gawd I stopped you,” he said. “I kep’ stopping people all day and they messed me up, but you been straight”.

The writer, who lives alone in the country, gives Thompson a job as his cook, and things change from day one.
 

Relationship puzzles? Thank Heaven there are only 2 genders!

Do you ever reach a point where relationship is doing your head in?  I do, regularly, but I’ve found a way of looking on the bright side.  Imagine if there were three genders, not two: instead of a man and a woman trying to get it together, there’d be three.  Let’s call them male, female and alien.



Male, female and alien, looking for harmony

Now a man would have to understand, impress and attract two quite different species, not just one.  And the female and the alien would have to fancy each other as well as the man.  Exciting sex positions would become far harder, with three genders having to align themselves.  But the permutations could be boggling.

Father of the Bride: A Rite of Passage for You Too

A few weeks ago my younger daughter got married, the first wedding in our family for over twenty years.  The intense feelings of that day are still strongly with me, they’re a surprisingly large part of my present awareness.  I keep wanting to go up to strangers and tell them about my daughter’s wedding, and I’m a person who rarely talks to strangers about anything.  I am writing this partly to work out for myself why it was such a major experience.

Football as a map of the inner life for men

I am writing this at the end of May 2011: it has been one of the most exciting Premiership seasons for years, with the relegation battles going right to the wire on the last day.  Followed by the extraordinary experience of our League champions being totally outclassed by Barcelona in the European Cup Final.  Since so many men share my love for the game, it seems wise to use it as a guide or metaphor for the inner life in a blog intended for men.

Top 11 books for maturing men: #’s 7 and 11

Here are the details of two of the best books I've found to help men make sense of life beyond 50.