What We’re Teaching Our Sons
Wise and funny, touching and true, What We’re Teaching Our Sons is for anyone who has ever wondered how to be a grown up.We’re teaching our sons about money; about heartbreak, and mountains, and philosophy. We’re teaching them about the big bang and the abominable snowman and what happens when you get struck by lightning. We’re teaching them about the toughness of single mothers, and the importance of having friends who’ve known you longer than you’ve known yourself, and the difference between zombies and vampires.We’re teaching them about sex, although everyone would be a lot happier if the subject had never come up…Meet the married Dads, the divorced Dads, the widowed Dads and the gay Dads; the gamblers, the firemen, the bankers, the nurses, the soldiers and the milkmen. They’re trying to guide their sons through the foothills of childhood into the bewildering uplands of adulthood. But it’s hard to know if they’re doing it right.Or what their sons’ mothers think…Wise and funny, touching and true, What We’re Teaching Our Sons is for anyone who has ever wondered how to be a grown up.
Читать What We’re Teaching Our Sons онлайн беплатно
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This Ebook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Owen Booth 2018
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Owen Booth asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008282592
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008282608
Version: 2018-08-20
To Stan and Arthur
Contents
The Loneliness of Billionaires
The Life-Saving Properties of Books
What Happens When You Get Struck by Lightning
The World’s Most Dangerous Spiders
The Conquest of the South Pole
The Particular Smell of Hospitals at Three in the Morning
The War Against the Potato Beetle
The Fifteen Foolproof Approaches to Making Someone Fall in Love with You
The Wonderful Colours of the Non-Neurotypical Spectrum
The Extinction of the Dinosaurs
The Importance of Good Posture and Looking After your Teeth
We’re teaching our sons about the great outdoors.
We’re teaching them how to appreciate the natural world, how to understand it, how to survive in it. As concerned fathers have apparently been teaching their sons since the Palaeolithic.
We’re teaching our sons how to make fires and lean-to shelters, how to tie twenty-five different kinds of knot, how to construct animal traps from branches and vines. We’re teaching them how to catch things, how to kill things, how to gut things. Out on the frozen marshes before dawn we produce hundreds of rabbits out of sacks, try to show our sons how to skin the rabbits.
Our sons look over our shoulders, distracted by the beautiful sunrise. They don’t want anything to do with skinning rabbits.
Out on the frozen marsh we explain the importance of being self-sufficient, and capable, and knowing the names of different cloud formations and geological features, and how to identify birds by their song.
‘Cumulonimbus,’ we say. ‘Cirrus. Altostratus. Terminal moraine. Blackbird. Thrush. Wagtail.’
We hand out fact sheets and pencils, collect the rabbits. We promise prizes to whoever can identify the most types of trees.
‘Can we set things on fire again?’ our sons ask.
The stiff grass creaks under our feet as we make our way back to the car park. The sky is the colour of rusted copper.
‘Can we set fire to a car?’
‘No, you can’t set fire to a car,’ we say. ‘Why would you want to set fire to a car?’
‘To see what would happen,’ our sons mutter, sticking their bottom lips out.
We look at our sons, half in fear, wondering what we have made.
We’re teaching our sons about drowning.
We tell them how we almost drowned when we were four years old. How we can still remember the feeling of being dragged along the bottom of the swollen river, the gravel in our faces, the smell of the hospital that lingered for weeks afterwards.
We don’t want this to happen to our sons. Or worse.
We take our sons swimming every Sunday morning, try to teach them how to stay afloat. Each week we have to find a new swimming pool, slightly further from where we live, slightly more overcrowded. The council is methodically demolishing all the sports centres in the borough as part of the Olympic dividend.
We are being concentrated into smaller and smaller spaces.
In the water our sons cling to us. Our hundreds of sons. They splash and kick their legs gamely, but they don’t seem to be getting any closer to being able to swim. We have to bribe them to put their faces under the water, and the price goes up every week.
We’re sure it wasn’t like this when we were children.
The water is a weird colour and tiles keep falling off the ceiling onto the swimmers’ heads. A scum of discarded polystyrene cups floats in the corner of the pool. It’s hotter than a sauna in here.
