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.
Practical Tools
Men are not, contrary to the stereotype, immune to worry. They are, however, remarkably creative in their methods of not dealing with it — methods that tend to work briefly, poorly, and at increasing cost.
Work And Retirement
If you retired over a decade ago and still find yourself back at the office every time you close your eyes, you are not going mad. You are, however, more interesting to psychologists than you might like to be.
Body and Mind
Birdwatching has an image problem. It is associated, in the popular imagination, with a specific type of person standing in a field in waterproof clothing, writing something in a notebook, apparently content. This article is an argument that the 'apparent content' part is not a coincidence.