Over the past 12 months, I’ve proposed to my girlfriend, moved house, got married, and become a father. The most stressful of these tests, without a doubt, was moving house. Forget strappado (a torture whereby you’re strung up by your arms behind your back) or flagellation or sensory deprivation. Moving to Acton: that’s what’ll break you down.
I really wish, back then, I’d had a copy of Tim Dowling’s How to be a Husband to hand. I might have used it, I think, if I’d gripped it at the maximal angle, to beat my solicitor to death. Sadly, this hybrid book — half-memoir, half-manual — is lacking in tips on how to inflict agony on lawyers (I would tentatively suggest strappado) but it’s solid on my other three recent rites of passage.
Re his marriage proposal, the author confesses that there wasn’t one, per se: he and his wife merely decided to get hitched with the ‘resigned determination of two people plotting to bury a body in the woods’. ‘Terrifying, difficult and unutterably naff’ is how he describes the wedding itself (that rings a few bells). But he concedes that the ordeal also had the effect of strengthening their bond, rather as if they had appeared together in an episode of Dancing on Ice.
When it comes to fatherhood, there are pitfalls, the author admits, among them the risk of failing to earn any respect from your offspring. One of his sons, he reveals, invariably greets him with a slap on either cheek. Another has a habit of addressing him as ‘Daddy me laddy’.
This isn’t a self-help book, Dowling insists. That’s for sure. What he has done, effectively, is invent an entirely new genre in literature: that of the self-hinder book.
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