Young men are being let down from an early age owing to a lack of role models - Sarah Todd
Magazines are forever full of celebrities talking about their work-to-life balance and all the travel and different fun family activities they fit in around their precious ‘me time’.
Real life can sometimes seem like a mirror of this, with women in the queue at the supermarket wearing leggings talking about how they are just dashing to meet a friend for coffee before a Pilates class and other such smugness.
Meanwhile, yours truly has a kitchen table that hasn’t got a single square of free space for scribbled notes about jobs to do and invoices and forms that need sorting. Instead of fancy juicers or air fryers, our kitchen worktops are covered with lamb bottles, sun cream, trousers with holes that need mending, packets of seeds that should have been planted two months ago and - to put the tin hat on it - the 25 year-old daughter’s underwear drying on the oven top.
The family of three terriers are all asleep, beside the knicker-laden oven, but every so often they give a look. Just a reminder, that it’s about time they went for a run around outside.
Where does the time go? Last June we took father and daughter to Bramham Horse Trials and they had a photograph professionally taken, in a new little ringside attraction that was doing a roaring trade.
Where is this beautiful portrait? Rather than its desired destination, hung in the hallway for all to see, it’s crammed behind a basket (that’s full of stuff) on - you’ve guessed it - the kitchen worktop.
The horse trials are back at Bramham Park, near Wetherby, this week and the temptation to take the mother terrier to get her photograph taken is huge.
Mind you, this would involve finding the muzzle bought at last year’s event - just in case as she doesn’t suffer fools gladly - and that would be another hurdle. Perhaps in that basket on the side?
Among the piles of papers is an ever-expanding list of television programmes that one day your correspondent would like to sit down and watch.
As an aside, how come in winter there seems to be a shortage of good telly, yet in summer when it’s nine o’clock before we even think about sitting down there are so many shows that sound like they would be an enjoyable watch.
In no particular order, there is the second series of the screen adaption of the late Dame Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster Rivals. There are the last two programmes of the BBC in Scotland’s excellent This Farming Life, the Peaky Blinders film, the second series of the Yorkshire rags-to-riches story The Hardacres. The Netflix documentary about Tyson Fury’s family is sure to be a bit of fun; his wife proving to be an absolute wonderwoman in the first series. This list could go on forever, so one last scribble from the list - besides tasks such as ‘ironing’ and ‘accountant’ - is a film. Missed, of course, at the cinema. It stars Martin Clunes and is called Mother’s Pride and is all about locals saving a village pub.
Hang on, room now must be found to add on the name ‘Gareth Southgate’. Football isn’t of any interest, but the former England manager’s hour-long documentary (available on iPlayer for those like me who missed it on Monday) Changing the Game for Young Men looks an interesting watch.
For decades pieces have been penned from this chaotic kitchen about the way the education system ignores boys at our nation’s peril. So many lads don’t have dads at home and have had to grow up in cardigan-clad classrooms where boys are so rarely allowed to be boys.
From simple things, like interesting them in reading, they are let down at every avenue. Yours truly did it courtesy of a subscription to that old friend Dennis the Menace and his Bash Street chums in the Beano.
This graduated to Tractor & Machinery magazine, but what about those young men who don’t have family to take the time to help them find something for them to read? So many come home to an all-female household, with a constant narrative that the male of the species isn’t worth bothering with.
It’s music to the ears to hear that, in this programme, Sir Gareth calls for the way boys are taught in schools to be changed.
He looks at possible solutions, such as getting older men volunteering to be mentors and steering them away from online influencers, who con them that life is all about the materialistic.
If all else fails, they must tune in to (yet another one on the list) Clarkson’s Farm. Fresh air, hard work and some proper role models…