What We’re Teaching Our Sons. Owen Booth
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Life Skills
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
The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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.
Also, we keep being distracted by the sight of the swimsuited mothers. The mothers who come in all sorts of fantastic shapes and