What a marvellous stroke that was….

It’s nice to feel like a man. I don’t mean ‘feel like a man’ in the making-an-order-in-a-restaurant kind of a way, no, but as in feeling quintessentially male. I don’t need to feel consciously like a man too often, and I certainly don’t dress in big boots and lumberjack gear, call people ‘buddy’ or force myself to lift weights even though it’s boring. The feeling arrives not from trying to drink my own bodyweight in sherry and newcastle brown as once it might (this being more a function of my bodyweight at the time than any attempt to drink much). I don’t even like Formula 1 (it sounds like it’s a baby feed for a reason).

But when that feeling comes along, I find scratching that residual primeval itch is quite a quiet pleasure.

A month or two back I delivered the eulogy at Winchester Cathedral at the funeral for both of a very lovely friend’s parents. It’s exactly the sort of thing I’d like to be able to do well but let the formality and the unadlibability of the occasion make me madly nervous. I could have dodged doing it but I did it, which was hugely important to me, and I think I did it well. In some strange way I walked out every so slightly, ever so quietly, more of a man than I went in. This doesn’t happen much when you’re not 20 anymore. I was rather nice, I have to confess.

I had that feeling a couple of years ago – it came when I got a tractor. And today, when the vineyard sprayer arrived, I had that feeling again. Not because of the sprayer itself – although it is mighty fine and rather grown up – but (and this is truly truly sad I know) because I’d organised to have it haulaged here. Haulage is for men, everybody knows that.

It’s starting to occur to me that perhaps too much of me is still aged 7, laughs too long and too hard at farts, and perhaps shouldn’t do a really poor impersonation of Richie Benaud at the TV when watching the cricket, even (especially) when I’m home alone.

In case you’re wondering, the other pic is of the first Szechuan peppercorns of the summer starting to ripen.