Body and Mind
Alcohol has been the social lubricant of human civilisation for approximately ten thousand years. It has also been responsible for considerable human misery. These two facts exist simultaneously and require acknowledgement in roughly equal measure.
Body and Mind
Uncle Derek. The one who says the thing that everyone else was thinking but had the collective sense not to say out loud. He is simultaneously the most entertaining and most mortifying person at the table. There is a reason for this, and it is considerably more interesting than simple rudeness.
Body and Mind
The brain does not retire when you do. It continues operating on the same fundamental principle it always has: use it or watch it quietly deteriorate while you're watching daytime television. The choice, within certain limits, is yours.
Body and Mind
The man in the garage with his hands in an engine, the one rebuilding a wall on a Saturday afternoon, the one who spent three hours fixing something. They are, it turns out, doing something rather important.
Life Stages And Transitions
Relevance is not something that happens to you. It is something you maintain — or don't — through a series of choices that most men don't realise they're making until the moment they notice they've stopped being made.
Body and Mind
Men have a well-documented tendency to arrive at serious illness later than necessary, sicker than they need to be, and more surprised than the evidence warrants. This article is about why that happens and what it costs.
Practical Tools
Overwhelm isn’t a character flaw. It’s not some moral failing, like leaving the toilet seat up or thinking cargo shorts are a good idea. It’s simply what happens when you keep stacking demands higher and higher until the whole thing starts to wobble like a badly built shed in a gale.
Life Stages And Transitions
Having a child in your 40s or 50s is increasingly common, frequently unplanned, and almost entirely unlike the experience of becoming a father at 25 — in ways that are sometimes better, sometimes harder, and occasionally both simultaneously.
Understanding Your Mind
Middle-aged men are expected to make peace with Radio 2 and accept that the music of their youth has been appropriately filed under nostalgia. Some of us have declined this invitation.
Practical Tools
There's a point during adult life when most men quietly abandon things they enjoyed because the enjoyment no longer seemed sufficiently justifiable. This is a mistake with consequences that go considerably beyond the unused guitar in the spare room.
Body and Mind
A diagnosis of epilepsy in midlife or later arrives without warning, removes things you didn't know you valued until they were gone, and requires a period of adjustment that nobody fully prepares you for. This article is an honest account of what that involves — and what tends to come after.
Life Stages And Transitions
After the age of 12, most British men have abandoned their shorts. Along the way, a significant number choose to revisit them. This is not a fashion story. It is, however, a psychological one.