What do you do when you can’t sleep at 4am because of the mosquito bites? You can’t sleep in the day because it is too hot and after weeks of sleeping in an air-conditioned room, it starts to play on your mind. You lay awake worrying about why your brother has decided to change his name to River and what your son and his mates really got up to on holiday in Ayia Napa that caused them to lose their €250 deposit. Apart from driving the quad bike into the garage doors and using the ironing board to go surfing in the pool and…?
In answer to the last question, I was directed to the website, truelad.com, which is full of quite amusing little anecdotes about lads dressing up in suits and ties after getting Norwich to the FA Cup final on Football Manager and jokes about Emile Heskey winning the women’s title at Wimbledon. Boys’ holidays are a ritual, a rite of passage. It is all about coming of age and becoming a lad. A little gem of a window on how young people think. This is all pretty ironic on the day that I was listening to a debate on the BBC about a recent resurgence in British feminism.
The group Feminista is claiming that feminism is having a renaissance amongst twentysomethings. Really? I’m with the cynics on this one. Most of the twentysomething women I know are more interested in footballers and their wives than reading Germaine Greer. But maybe that is because they think they already know how to get what they want. And it seems they would rather compete with the lads on their own terms in places like Ayia Napa, wearing T-shirts that shout ‘Easy Lay,’ than attend summer schools and workshops on how to run an effective feminist group. Boys read lad mags and girls just do what they want.
The name-changing thing is more difficult to understand. Water symbolises a healthy flow and creating new connections in your life. This is what happens when you spend too much time doing life coaching instead of reading books. Then River became Evian but not Buxton Spring. If you start sending emails to your friends and signing them, ‘Evian, formerly known as River, formerly known as…..in the style of ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’ or ‘His Royal Badness’ then the only appropriate response is a truelad one. After a few drinks at lunch another friend responded to the emails and signed them, ‘Regards, Pissed.’ ‘Formerly known as sober, formerly known as pissed, formerly known as very pissed.’ Then we all joined in for a laugh. Political times we live in…..
