Men Know Who They Are
‘A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.’
Groucho Marx
‘Mummy?’
‘Yes, sweetheart.’
‘On non-uniform day, if I go as Spider-Man instead of as a princess, will I get laughed at?’
‘I suppose you might. What will you say if they laugh?’
‘Shall I tell them that they’re laughing because of The Trick that makes boys unhappy and girls get rubbish jobs?’
‘Yes, sweetheart. I think that would be a very good answer.’
It’s 2015 and the person asking the question is a five-year-old girl called Esme. The person answering is her mother, Abigail. Abbie is my wife; Ezzie is our eldest daughter. We also have Dory (for Dorothea), who is three.
‘The Trick’ is the family code-word for the incoming tide of gender bullshit that Ezzie, Dory and their friends (including the boys) will spend their lives wading through. The idea that boys and girls, men and women, have different roles to play in life according to the different contributions they make to a shared reproductive system is one they are going to have to deal with whether we like it or not. So they might as well have a name for it.
You may think that introducing the idea of ‘the patriarchy’ into the minds of small children is the ultimate in liberal overkill. You may even think that it’s cruel. In my view, you might as well say it’s cruel not to let them have a teddy-bears’ picnic in the Dartford Tunnel. The Trick is dangerous for girls. And if I’ve tried to say anything in this book, I’ve tried to say that it’s dangerous for boys too. Feminism is not about men versus women; it’s about men and women versus The Trick.
I met Abbie in 2003, recording a Radio 4 comedy show called Concrete Cow.
After a long wait, the first series of Peep Show was about to be broadcast on Channel 4, so among this unknown cast of six I’m equally unknown but have a kind of ‘pre-celebrity something-or-other’ going on. David and I have had too many setbacks for me to treat this the way I would in my Dick Wittington pomp. By which I mean, I try not to lord it around like a golden penis. I make everyone tea in the green room; I carefully note that Abigail says her brothers call her ‘Abs’ and drop it in casually when asking if she wants milk; I laugh immoderately at everyone else’s jokes and make suggestions for script improvements with elaborate courtesy. I am doing my impression of a good company player. But I don’t do such a good impression as to leave them in any doubt that it’s an impression. My every deliberate gesture is there to scream: ‘You’re bloody lucky to have me, but I’m being VERY HUMBLE ABOUT IT.’
Abbie’s having none of it. Over a cast lunch I say that my friend Emma was talking to a colleague at work about how I had a part in a sitcom. The colleague had said, ‘What, like a shopkeeper or an extra or something?’ and Emma had replied, ‘No! He’s one of the main ones!’
Abbie takes this in for a beat and says, ‘So that was a story about how you’re one of “the main ones”?’ Then she opens her eyes madly wide and cries in a cod Californian accent, ‘WHAT . . . A GREAT . . . STORY!!!’
Her reaction to me in general is evenly divided between thinking I’m an idiot, and thinking I’m an idiot that she might want to shag. But then, along with my deliberate gestures there are my undeliberate gestures, like the way I pull my T-shirt up and jump around in front of her. Or the way I go up to her face and yap like a dog.
‘I think that Cambridge boy might fancy me,’ she says to her friend Brede. Brede is in the audience during the first recording and confirms that whenever Abbie goes to the microphone at the front of the stage, I spend the whole sketch staring at her bottom. Yes, it’s possible.
Abbie went to a single-sex boarding school and her own flirtation technique is equally mature and straightforward. When she hears me say that none of Shakespeare’s comedies are actually funny, she starts singing a made-up song called ‘Pretty boy is a fucking moron’.
We spend the end-of-series cast meal talking to each other. Sadly, Auntie Trudy just died and I tell Abbie about her and she tells me about her Auntie Elsa. We quietly lose the others on the way to the pub and snog in the taxi all the way back to my flat. When we get out, the driver says, ‘Please invite me to the wedding!’
Three weeks later, we’re in a pub in Clapham called the Eagle. We’re having a chat which turns into me explaining slowly and carefully all the reasons why I’m hopelessly in love with her. She replies, with a smile and a shine to her beautiful eyes, ‘My heart is full.’
Three years after that, we can’t invite the taxi driver because we forgot to get his number. But we pack St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden – ‘the Actors’ Church’ – with lots of other family and friends. ‘This room,’ says my best man, David Mitchell, ‘is full of very nice people.’
Indeed it is, including David himself. Here are Abbie’s cool friends from UCL and drama school. Here’s Jenna with her smashing future husband, Nick. Here’s Heather Slater from QEGS and Carole Plumb from the Dower House. Here’s Patrick, Joe and Dora from Robinson. Here’s Eddie and Jack and my Footlights friends. Here’s Will and his lovely wife.
Absurdly, magnificently far-fetched vows are exchanged, along with gold rings and a kiss. It’s late December and the hymns are replaced with Christmas carols. We sing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ with men and women taking alternate verses, to the amusement of both. Jack brilliantly belts out Sondheim’s ‘Being Alive’ and Eddie beautifully reads ‘[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]’ by ee cummings. That song and that reading: it’s not as if Abbie and I don’t have the right ideas about what marriage might be.
It’s just that – now – I look at pictures from the wedding, and although I remember a fantastic day, I also see something else: it’s ‘Jean all smiling’, the one who doesn’t know she’s dead – and I feel an unwanted irony. Look at this young couple enjoying their wedding. They don’t know, do they? They don’t know they’re walking straight back into The Trick.
*
But first, one last word from Mr Paul Frederick Webb.
. . . forsaking all others . . . If you’re going to swap a promise like this, it’s probably a good idea to know what you’re asking the other person to forsake. Obviously Abbie, who spent her hen night toasting her former lovers (that took quite a few refills), knew all about mine.
So did Dad.
He bangs his hand on the table. ‘I knew it! You like a bit of both, boy! Fair enough, mate. You just like shagging and you’re not fussy! It’s not my scene, but God knows, with women, even I’ve sometimes nearly put it in the wrong hole, so to speak. Good old boy.’
Well, he did ask.
We’re back in 1994 and I’m home from Cambridge and missing Clara. She came to stay for a few days and Dad seems delighted that I’ve got such a clever, posh, blonde girlfriend. In fact, now that the evidence is in that I’m somehow capable of making this happen, it’s like he’s emboldened to ask a question that seems to have been bothering him for some time.
We’re watching Channel 4 News over tea as usual. There’s a report about teenage suicide among boys who’ve been subjected to homophobic bullying.
‘It’s not bloody right,’ Dad says angrily into his pork chops, sausage, bacon, leeks, mash and cauliflower cheese, ‘they’re only little old boys. They can’t help it if they’re shirt-lifters, bless them.’
He can do this, our dad. He can come out with statements so fantastically wrong and fantastically right in the space of one sentence that all I can do is prepare the next forkful of sausage, bacon and cauliflower. ‘Not bloody right at all,’ he repeats. He’s gearing up for something; he’s getting himself cross enough for some kind of announcement. He clatters his knife and fork down on the sides of his plate. Christ, what now?
‘I mean, I’ve always said that if you – or Mark or Andrew – ever thought you might be – or Mark or Andrew – that you might be that way inclined, I’d have no problem. No bloody problem whatsoever.’
‘Right,’ I say, helplessly.
‘I mean, there’s some blokes who’d chuck their sons out on the streets, but they’re twats. In my view. I’d never do that with you. Or Mark or Andrew.’
‘That’s . . . good.’
His expression softens slightly and he picks up his knife and fork. The next question is addressed to his food. ‘So what’s the score then, boy?’
Fucking hell, you’re joking, aren’t you? What, here? Now? OK, honey. Here goes.
‘Well, you know I’m with Clara, obviously.’
‘I do, mate. Lovely girl. Lady, I should say. Lovely young lady.’
‘And obviously, when you’re with one person then you’re with one person and that’s it.’ Given Dad’s historical approach to monogamy, I worry that this came out as an accusation, but he’s still listening. ‘But before her . . .’ I take the Michael Portillo line because, it happens to be true, ‘as a teenager and a younger man . . .’
‘Go on, boy. None of my business. Go on.’
‘. . . not all the people I had, erm, relations with were girls. In fact, one or two of them were boys.’
He goes into his jubilant table-banging routine.
A year earlier, my brother Andrew had said, ‘If you ever tell him, it’ll break his heart.’
No, mate, it didn’t break his heart. Mainly because he managed to turn it into an example of a typical Webb who needs to put knobs in holes. That and family loyalty. That and the fact that he loved us. There were times when any of the three of us could have told him that we’d just set fire to a hospital and he’d have found a way of saying that those hospital wankers probably had it coming.
Ultimately, we’re not talking about much sex with many people. But I was right to treat it as a big deal generally, just as I was wrong to think that Dad would have some kind of fit about me individually. This is the thing about villages: sooner or later, everyone knows everything about everyone else. There’s always ‘the score’. Person A drinks too much. B had an affair with C and they eloped to Cleethorpes. D had a breakdown when he lost his job and E and F are thinking about changing to The Guardian but seem normal otherwise. G’s garden is overlooked and everyone knows he deadheads his geraniums in the nude. I, J and K have all done time for ABH, but only L and M are on HRT. O, P, Q, R, S, T and U all have cancer. V cheats at golf.
Which is partly why, despite the stereotype suggested by the Daily Mail – a stereotype they collude in by buying the bloody thing – rural Conservatives are not the monsters of bigotry that I and some of my friends on the left have occasionally found it convenient to assume. In fact, they are some of the most tolerant people I’ve ever met. Not because they’re inherently nicer than city-dwellers, but because they don’t have a choice.
For twenty-five years I’ve been made to feel welcome in Woodhall Spa Conservative Club: drinking there and playing snooker with Dad, Mark, Andrew and their friends. My public support for Labour has been discreetly overlooked. It’s recognition that community is more important than politics, even as the best political disagreements are often about how best to maintain a community.
Dad made exceptions for me just as I made exceptions for him. His views on snooty, Champagne socialist, metropolitan, formally pan-affectionate, middle-class Oxbridge luvvies had to take a step back when he noticed he had one for a son.
And my views of baby-boomer, non-college-educated, slightly racist, deeply sexist, angry white working-class Tories were tempered by having one as a dad. This is the kind of forced empathy that villages, not just families, are rather good at. Given the divisiveness of the Brexit vote and the Trump presidency, I think it’s worth saying that it’s precisely these exceptions, these accommodations we have to make with each other, that create cracks in the wall of mutual suspicion and make possible a politics of civility – cracks which the algorithms and self-policing identity groups of Facebook and Twitter hastily try to paste over.
Well now, dear reader. I think it’s about time we had a look at the place I’ve so far managed to avoid, the place where we find this particular Webb, to put it mildly, not at his best. Time to go to the ending.
*
Imagine a child’s drawing of a house. This one is thinner but taller than the first one. It has a chimney, but no smoke comes out because the house is in London instead of Lincolnshire, and in London the fireplaces are pretend. Upstairs there’s a bedroom for the Big Sister and Little Sister, one for the Mummy and Daddy, and other rooms where the Mummy and Daddy go to look at their computers.
Downstairs, the Daddy is standing outside the back door of the kitchen with a cigarette in one hand and a can of beer in the other. He is waving at the Mummy. The Mummy is inside the kitchen and pointing at the Daddy while talking to him through the door. A speech bubble comes out of the Mummy’s mouth and there are lots of long words including, ‘disappointment’, ‘certifiable’ and ‘alcoholic’.
All this time, The Trick had been lying in wait. You can spend your twenties believing in equality, but if you were raised in an averagely Tricky family then you’re going to need a very careful and realistic plan when you start your own. Otherwise, all your talk of liberation is going to count for dick once the nappies hit the fan. There are many ways to be a dad, but instead of making up my own way, I just let the original model reassert itself. Unfortunately the original model was no beauty. Unfortunately, it was Dad.
So you work and you’re tired and you come in and the baby is crying and sometimes your wife is coping brilliantly and enjoying life and sometimes she’s obviously got postnatal depression and can barely stand up for exhaustion. Either way, you can make sympathetic noises, but it’s really none of your business because you’re working and if you’re not working you deserve a beer.
The promise I’d made was to be a 50/50 husband and father. I would do half the house and half the kids. It was a good promise. Abbie was working; I was working: there would be a bit of rebalancing but it would be no sweat. Obviously, I just needed to be a bit more fussy about the work I said yes to.
Instead, I said yes to everything. I’m a father. I have a family to support. I’m not going to be famous for ever. I need to make hay. A man works. You’ll thank me later. I’m tired. I need a drink. I changed that nappy, didn’t I? I did the bottles and the steriliser, didn’t I?
I look at my CV over those years and there’s persuasive evidence of breadwinning panic. Great Movie Mistakes, Argumental, Robert’s Web,1 Pop’s Greatest Dance Crazes, Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, and almost any ad or voice-over going. I did all this stuff as well as I technically could, but my heart wasn’t in it and the audience noticed.
What’s worse is that when I wasn’t working, I was just sitting outside, drinking, smoking and talking to myself. Fantasies of violence, usually. That time I had to blow my cover as an MI5 agent by shooting a terrorist. That rapist I beat up. That time Jonathan Ross got me to admit I’d served in a certain regiment of the British Army. David, of course, only really established himself on panel shows for want of something to do while I was in Kosovo. I stayed up late to rehearse these make-believe conundrums. It was desperately important without being much fun. The Guy-Buys weren’t fun any more. They were all constantly pissed. I wished the Guy-Buys would pull themselves together.
Either that or I was picking a fight on social media. Twitter was the Coningsby Community Centre I never had. It’s like I was making up for all those punch-ups I previously had the sense to avoid. I charged bravely into the fray, armed with nothing more than a four-pack of Kronenbourg and a block button. And then charged away again when suddenly everyone seemed terribly cross.
I was like the bad driver to whom everything comes as a surprise. What zebra crossing? Ooh, that roundabout came out of nowhere! Why is everyone beeping? Why am I in the Daily Mirror just because I said I couldn’t stand Jeremy Corbyn? What’s wrong with having a pointless scrap with Julia Hartley-Brewer?2 Oh, hello Abbie. What’s that you say? It’s three in the morning? Is it? Oh, so it is. I was just coming . . . Yes, if you’d listen, I was saying that I was just coming in. I’m not shouting. Why would I shout? Fucking hell, it’s only a couple of beers . . .
*
Me and a spot of alcohol dependency, then. Who could have possibly seen that coming?
How bad did it get? No idea, I was mainly drunk. Not falling down drunk, never drunk when filming or before a show; I never got the shakes or had to do a Leaving Las Vegas with a bottle of vodka. On at least two occasions I remember putting a cork back in a wine bottle that wasn’t empty. I’m no doctor, but this doesn’t sound to me like most alcoholics. It doesn’t even sound like most doctors.
I was, however, being a relentless pain in the arse. Mostly absent, often slurred and forgetful: there was no conversation worth having that I didn’t need to have twice. Certainly never violent, but much quicker to take offence. Slow, pompous, chippy. You’ve met this guy, this woman. A dick. A boring, drunken dick. Not all the time, not every single day. But some of the time, most days. Eventually Abbie just wrote me a letter telling me how much she missed me.
What was going on in my head now that I had children?
What do I remember about houses with small children in them? Actually, let’s not remember.
What do I remember about the fathers of small children? Let’s not go there either.
But mothers! Mothers are great. And what mothers do eventually is that they . . . ooh. Let’s just pop open another lager and be somewhere else. The future, preferably. The future where I get it together.
But for now, there’s Daddy in the picture, standing outside, waving at his two daughters through the kitchen window. It’s as if he prefers it. It’s as if young families make Daddy sad.
Yes, it’s time for the traditional Chapter 14 pub quiz. As with society, you don’t have to be a heterosexual male to join in, but it has been created mainly with that in mind. The subject of this week’s quiz is: Gender, Sexism and Masculinity in the Half-Changed Liberal Mind. Yes, this is quite a weird pub. Here goes!
1. Your girlfriend is getting ready to go out to the pub and is wearing make-up. Do you:
a) suggest she puts on a bit more make-up
b) ask her why she’s wearing make-up when you’re only going to the pub
c) tell her she looks best with no make-up
d) shut the fuck up about make-up because it’s not your face
2. Your girlfriend is unusually irritable today. You figure it’s about a month since her last period. Do you:
a) triumphantly tell her she’s being an arsehole because she’s got PMT
b) suggest gently that it’s possible that she’s being an arsehole because she’s got PMT
c) make her a cup of tea and say it can’t be much fun having PMT, especially when it turns you into such an arsehole
d) make her a cup of tea and don’t fucking mention PMT. If you knew your cock was going to start bleeding tomorrow and it was going to be very painful and extremely inconvenient and this has been happening every month since puberty and it isn’t going to stop until your fertility disappears, presaging your own death and forgoing the miraculous opportunity to carry another living being inside your body and then give birth to it like having a snooker ball pushed out of the end of your cock – not a melon out of your arse, but a snooker ball out of your jizz-sprinkler – then you’d be a bit fucking cranky too
3. A man who sits down to do a wee is:
a) nearing the end of his useful life and should be given a one-way ticket to Switzerland to get Dignitased
b) some manner of pervert
c) clearly just back in from a night on the lash and urinating in the only way viable but doing so with shame
d) just a guy having a wee. Possibly because he lives with three other people who do sit-down wees and this saves a bit of loo-seat admin. However, he remains a man because he doesn’t locate his self-respect in wee posture
4. A bar stool is:
a) an item of pub furniture for ladies and students
b) somewhere to put your coat if it isn’t occupied by a lady or student
c) something to lean against with a straight left arm, holding your pint in your right hand (reverse this for left-handers and homosexuals), while cocking your left foot over your right with the left-foot toes pointing at the floor
d) somewhere to sit, but not as good as a normal chair
5. On average, women earn less money than men over their lifetimes because:
a) they tend to be a fair bit lazier and stupider than men
b) they’re just as clever and hard-working as men but their brains aren’t really suited to certain well-paid professions and this is because of science and their being from Venus
c) they’re just as clever and hard-working as men and their brains are equally suited to any profession, but they lose out when they choose to start a family
d) give me a break. For about 500 discriminatory reasons, including: they’re just as clever and hard-working as men and their brains are equally suited to any profession, but they lose out, not because they choose to start a family, but because society chooses to impose a financial penalty on them for starting a family in a way that it doesn’t for men
How did you get on? If you scored 5,634, then congratulations because . . .
That’s Numberwang! If you didn’t get 5,634, commiserations. Also, if you answered anything other than d) for any question, then you have been Wangernumbed and must now be taken out to be gassed.
On with the show!
*
I’m with Dada (my granddad, John) in his care home. He’s ninety.3
I’m sure we’ve all seen it, the Care Home Kaleidoscope Synecdoche (I expect this phrase will catch on): a house concentrated into a single, glittering room. Trinkets, ornaments, pictures in frames – the mementos that survived the downsize. They stand for all the treasures – including the people – left behind.
The horizon is narrowing and the pathos is there too in John’s conversation. The man who did his bit to destroy the Third Reich tells me once again that the food here is good but, if anything, they tend to put a little too much on his plate.
It’s 2012 and I’m there with Abbie, Esme (three) and Dory (a few months). Dory needs a nap and Abbie apologises, taking her out for a ride in the buggy. The tea lady just came and gave Ezzie a couple of chocolate biscuits which she has eaten with all the care and precision you’d expect from a three-year-old. ‘Sorry about the mess, John,’ I say, picking crumbs off the carpet and madly putting them in my pocket. One of the first things you learn when you have small children is to just go with the mess, embrace the mess. This doesn’t mean that you expect everyone else to embrace it too.
‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ John says.
Esme is restless and asks for a story. I look at my granddad. ‘Would that be all right, John? If I read Ezzie a story?’ I slightly project my voice at his massive ninety-year-old ears while trying to avoid the patronising sing-song that seems to get professional care-workers through their day.
‘Ooh . . . yes please. I’d like to hear a story too,’ he says, with a slow-motion smile starting to form. ‘I mean, you’ve already heard all mine!’
I rifle through the bag that Abbie has made up of stuff to distract the kids. John’s smile is disappearing as slowly as it formed and his glazed blue eyes are searching through the past. He adds, not unhappily, ‘I wish I’d read y’mother a few more stories.’
I swallow hard. ‘I’m sure you were busy, mate. Don’t worry, she got the knack in the end.’
‘Well, yeah . . . she was a great reader, our Pat. By guy!’
‘By guy’ is the way John softens ‘By God’ when in the presence of women or children. It reminds me of something, but I don’t follow the thought: before me is the great pleasure of reading to my daughter and grandfather at the same time.
I open Zog by Julia Donaldson. Zog is an infant dragon who goes to dragon nursery school to learn how to do dragon-like things. About halfway through, Ezzie asks, ‘Are dragons real?’ I wrestle with this for a moment, but decide not to lie.
‘No, sweetheart. There are no real dragons.’
Ezzie takes this in and looks again at the pictures in the book. ‘But they’re real in the story.’
Gosh. That’s a good way of putting it. Must remember that one.
‘Yes, my love. They’re real in the story.’
*
We are storytelling animals, us humans.
‘By guy . . .’ John had said. By guy . . . Guy-Buy? Is that where I got the name, all those years ago? The name for the Guy-Buys, my gang of twelve disciples, by God?
I doubt it, but it’s tempting to think so. Life is a mess and the desire is always to try and straighten it out instead of embracing it as it is; to unpick the cobweb into its silvery thread.
What if Mum hadn’t died? What if I hadn’t had to go back to school for a year? What if I’d got ABC grades the first time and had gone to Leeds? There were funny people at Leeds but I wouldn’t have met David. So, no Mitchell and Webb. Which means we wouldn’t have been an off-the-shelf double act ready for Peep Show. Which means I probably wouldn’t have been cast in Concrete Cow. Which means no Abbie. Which means no Esme and no Dory.
That’s a hell of a silver lining. For me to make sense of Mum’s death, all I have to do is dispose of the best parts of my working life, unmeet Abigail and essentially bump off my children.
Abbie, understandably, finds this way of thinking completely insane. And her talking me out of it – this big-screen narrative I’d made for myself – was the beginning of my becoming a better husband and a better father. We create these stories for ourselves. But some stories we just grow out of.
And more than that, gradually it starts to dawn on me, I’m just this . . . bloke. Not just any old bloke, but one who has invested so much pride and energy into believing I am not a bloke that I’ve been acting like one of the worst blokes I’ve ever met. All the anxiety I’d felt about not being a proper boy had found an opposite reaction in avoiding my dismal definition of a proper man. Dad had given me such a frightening early exposure to traditional masculinity that I thought I had life-long antibodies. I thought that it was impossible for me to be an abrasive, hard-drinking bloke who takes his wife for granted because I’d seen what that looked like and it sucked. And the story in which I awarded myself a starring role – the sensitive young man whose Mum died, who got up and out of death and Lincolnshire, who can’t be sexist because he doesn’t like football, who can’t be sexist because he’s read Man Made Language by Dale Spender and votes Labour, who can’t be sexist because he once had a secret boyfriend, who can’t be sexist because he’s been writing anti-sexist comedy sketches since school and now gets paid to perform them on TV – that guy can’t possibly be in the grip of sexism. That guy might quietly notice that he’s broken his promise to be an equal partner in the home but . . . OK, fair point. Soon, Abbie. I’ll put this right soon.
‘You are not,’ Abbie would say for the umpteenth time, ‘about to amaze everyone by jumping on your horse like Prince Hal.’ I’d spent years thinking that literally any minute now I was going to suddenly transform into a present, reliable, sober, responsible, fun and loving parent and partner. In other words, an adult.
Instead, I was playing the ‘man-boy’ Jeremy Usborne while scarcely doing this man thing any better myself. It was all provisional. I would get round to it right after this job, this beer, this cigarette and this daydream.
The final nail in the coffin of the ‘provisional’ mindset came in the form of several nails in several coffins. In short, everyone died – John, Derek, Dad.
*
What do I want? What is my idea of a mature masculinity or an earned adulthood?
For a start, let’s not give it capital letters and make it a ‘thing’.
‘Well, honestly, nude zorbing, who’d have thought it? And now on BBC Breakfast, Robert Webb is here to explain Mature Masculinity.’
I mean, fuck off. Fuck off, baldy Peep Show dick.
As soon as it enters the zeitgeist it’s over. Anyone remember the New Man? This was a half-hearted attempt in the mid 1980s for guys to feel that they were in touch with their ‘feminine side’. It was largely to do with eyeliner. That and an attempt by Athena to shift another load of black and white posters featuring shirtless gay models holding babies.
The New Man died in 1985 when Lofty in EastEnders had an asthma attack after Michelle jilted him at the altar. Lofty was in love with single mum Michelle and had offered to become a ‘house-husband’. On the morning of the wedding, Michelle had a secret meeting with her child’s secret father, ‘Dirty Den’, a manipulative liar and adulterer with links to organised crime. So obviously Lofty didn’t stand a chance.
Mr Rochester has a lot to answer for. Charlotte Brontë’s original Fifty Shades of Moody Twat is the direct precursor of Dirty Den and the accompanying notion that only a tall, dark emotional car-crash can make anyone come.
The New Man was pathetic, but sufficient to provoke a backlash: the New Lad. Loaded, Zoo, Britpop, comedy was the New Rock and Roll! The only thing new about it was the chippy insistence that young men stop apologising about beer, football and promiscuity. I hadn’t noticed the apology (none was required anyway) and didn’t like being told that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t sit around obsessively compiling top-ten lists. And the bloody football again. Again with the bloody football.4
Culturally, we just lurch from one wonky stereotype to another. We’re all meant to be Rambo. No, we’re all meant to be Nick Hornby. No, we’re all meant to be Ed Sheeran in an ironic Rambo T-shirt listening to a Nick Hornby audiobook while perusing a catalogue of Grayson Perry ceramics. While crying and wanking.
I want the same thing for boys, men, girls, women and anyone who grew up feeling that none of these words held any meaning for them. I want them all to have the freedom to express their individual and contradictory selves with confidence and humility. Feminism has had some success in challenging the restrictive stereotypes of what a girl or woman is supposed to be like. What I’m after is extending that awareness to the half of the population who might still be under the impression that gender conditioning didn’t happen to them because they’ve got a Y chromosome.
Gentlemen, it did happen to you. I don’t blame you for forgetting because forgetting was part of the deal. I’ve been remembering for you.
It was forward of me I know, but I’m terribly modern like that.
*
If I claimed today to have made it as a 50/50 husband and parent, I think Abbie would either die laughing or just strangle me in my sleep.
But I hope I’m at least no longer the pompous dick I was in 2009 when I said to her, ‘I can’t get this done in one generation.’
Balls to that. It’s a change of attitude, not the evolution of gills.
Reimagining masculinity is worth doing for its own sake, but in my case I know Ezzie and Dory are watching me. I don’t assume that either will end up sharing their lives with a man, but if they do, I want them to expect good things. They know whether or not I’m taking responsibility for my own health; they know how often I walk them to school and pick them up afterwards; they know who’s emptying the dishwasher, who’s taking them to the dentist, who’s making his wife laugh and who’s arguing with her respectfully.
The Persil is the political. There are several steps to male enlightenment if he aims for equality of unpaid domestic labour. At first, he puts a wash on and expects a medal. When the medal doesn’t appear, he may give up. There again, if he has steel in his heart, he may try again. This time he puts a wash on and then takes the clothes out. He may even attempt to dry them. Still no medal. Finally, and this only took me five years, he may eventually put a wash on, dry the clothes, fold them up and put them away.
To be honest, I still find this last part quite challenging because, for the sake of speed and efficiency, Abbie has severe rules about which clothes go in which drawers. In fact, she has fairly strong views on what happens within each drawer. But she has encouraged me not to fear the System and I have been left with the impression that she prefers my getting the job slightly wrong to my refusing the job. It’s weird that I was ever in a position to refuse the job.
At home, I keep a close eye on my temper. Obviously, I’d rather chew my own arms off than hurt the children, but I also try to catch an oncoming mope or sulk: the Mood Tyrant can be just as scary as the guy throwing crockery around. I don’t drink alone and I’ve quit smoking. It remains a sexist world and I can’t change it for my daughters the way I would like to. But I can try to improve the situation one man at a time. Starting with me.
You can write a pop song about changing the Man in the Mirror: it’s just hard to get that message to stick if lots of people think you’re a child molester. Still, it’s a good idea. It’s never too late to try, especially because we only have so much time. As Johnson in Peep Show said at Gerrard’s funeral, ‘The scythe is remorseless. I hope the scythe’s remorseless swing can bring some comfort to you all. OK.’
*
I don’t know if I mentioned this, but we are all going to die.
There was a two-year period in my early forties when I lost Dad, then Derek, then my last grandparent, John.
Saying goodbye in the care home, I’d got used to the idea that it might be for the last time. This time, while Abbie and I are ushering the girls out of the door, I hear my ninety-two-year-old Dada say: ‘At least we had some good holidays, mate!’ I turn back and reassure him that we had some brilliant holidays, which we did.
But what does he mean, ‘at least’? I think I know: he felt a deficit. And so did Derek, and so did Dad. None of them spent their last words with me saying: ‘I wish I’d spent less time with my children, I wish I’d dominated more men, I wish I’d cried less, I wish I’d shrugged and walked away more often when I upset the women I loved, I wish I’d spent less time saying what I was really afraid of and what I really wanted.’ No, they ended their lives saying that they’d missed out on too much of the good stuff: friendship, understanding, family and love. And that they’d caused too much harm. That’s where I was heading until a few years ago, and there are boys whose bicycles still have stabilisers on that are heading in that direction right now.
I would save them the trouble. I mean to offer them a wider understanding of what it is to be a boy. That it’s OK to cry. It’s OK to talk about what’s wrong. It’s OK to play with girls if you like them, to dress like girls if you want to, to like the colour pink if you like it, to want to hang out with your mum if you love her company, to not be all that bothered about football if you’re not all that bothered about football.
But small boys know that already. They don’t invent these gender rules as they get older. We teach them.
It’s difficult to give an honest performance when you’ve been handed a lousy part. You stare at your lines, wondering how you’re supposed to make sense of them. You learn them and stumble through the show anyway, tripping up, getting in the way of yourself and the women you’re sharing the stage with. They’re having the same problem with their own part, except they also have to do all their moves backwards in high heels, with you talking over them and the spotlight shining on them too fiercely or not at all. The whole thing is a bad dream.
Some people forget that they ever expected anything else. Others get lucky. They’re the ones who remember being handed the script in the first place – the one that said BOY, or the one that said GIRL – and remember how disappointing it seemed when the only part they were born to play was the one called INSERT NAME HERE ______________.
Once you’ve remembered, it’s hard to go on with the show. It’s time, in fact, to write yourself a better part.
In St Peter’s Church in Woodhall Spa in 2013, I delivered the eulogy I’d written for Dad. The place was packed and another forty or so people were standing outside. I got a few laughs, remembered some of his unremembered acts of kindness, and ended it like this:
The sadness that we feel now, we can afford to hold close; safe as we are in the knowledge that grief is love’s echo. We only have to listen and it’s there. Today is a heavy day, but this is just an aftershock. The earthquake, the main event, as usual, was love.
He had three grandsons. When I told him, in 2008, that Abbie was expecting a baby, he said, ‘It’ll be a boy, boy. The Webbs only do boys.’ And then when we turned up with a girl, followed by another girl, he was delighted and said, ‘Robert has to be different, doesn’t he?’
Yes. Robert has to be different.
At the same time, Robert is completely typical . . .
‘Don’t let Nana or Trudy see you cry.’
‘You’re wearing girls’ socks!’
‘Do you want some of my beer, boy?’
‘I regret to inform you . . .’
‘Your behaviour has been deplorable.’
‘When’s it going to get romantic?’
‘Fuck off! He’s doing his best!’
‘My heart is full.’
‘You let me down.’
There are probably lots of men who haven’t had their lives marred or pointlessly complicated by the expectations of gender, but I’ve yet to meet one. You had to bury your pain; you had to conform to the tribe; you had to grow up faster than you wanted; you had to have sex as early as possible and with as many people as possible, even if that made you a liar; you weren’t romantic enough and you felt bad; you failed to do manly tasks with competence and felt bad; you made promises you couldn’t keep.
If you want a man of a certain age to go a bit quiet and stare into the middle distance for five seconds, ask him about his relationship with his father. Then expect the word ‘complicated’ to feature quite heavily in his next sentence.
The Trick is a stupefying waste of everyone’s time. It creates barriers, not just between men and women, but between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons. To oppose it has been the cause of feminists for many years. It’s a cause I share.
Just before we got married, Abbie wrote this:
Wedding Day
This, they say, is the best it gets –
this glorious day, so let’s
have this glorious day and kiss Goodnight,
and wake up hungover, and fight.
And make up and kiss Goodnight,
and wake up and make jokes:
some good, and make plans
and kiss Goodnight and sleep
and hold hands.
And wake up and insist and be wrong
and laugh like monkeys, without understanding, and be right.
And then let’s kiss
and kiss
and kiss
and kiss
and kiss
and kiss Goodnight,
and sleep
and keep each other warm
and wake up
and take up each other’s cause
and forsake all others, for as long as the light lasts.
And then let’s kiss our last Goodnight
And oh! Christ let me dream of your sweet face then.
Those of us who are loved have no excuse. I was right the first time when I tried to protect my bee in her roofless castle. All along, I had the information in my back pocket: I knew I was loved from the moment my mother picked me up at the bottom of the purple stairs. And when she died, I had the right idea as I sewed the badge back onto my school blazer.
‘He needs to be a friend to himself.’
Men will struggle to treat women as equals if we haven’t learned to look after ourselves; to recognise our feelings and take responsibility for our actions. We should remember what we knew all along: that we are allowed to be fully human, fully compassionate, fully alive in the moment and fully committed to friendship and love.
Self-respect and kindness to others: that’s it. That’s how we restore freedom to the galaxy . . .
You won’t be surprised to hear that some of my early enthusiasm for Star Wars might have leaked out and Ezzie and Dory are now big fans. We sometimes chat about those brave, beautiful rebels. Han and Luke, of course; how even Darth was a rebel in the end. And especially Princess Leia, the best kind of princess. Such conversations are not uncommon while we’re out playing in the garden.
Football, usually. We often play football. I’m starting to quite like it.
________________
1 A TV show about the internet which would have been a terrible idea even if I’d got my way and called it World Wide Robert. Some producers have no sense of adventure.
2 Katie Hopkins with adverbs.
3 I’m sorry, John, but I’m afraid that is not Numberwang.
4 Obviously, I have a reputation to defend as a leading ‘white knight cuck libtard feminazi’ but it’s worth saying that I have no problem with anyone enjoying football. I’m not down on all competitive sports just because I was shit at them. And living in your body, enjoying your own physicality, is a fun thing to do, despite also being physically and mentally healthy.