Thomas W. Hodgkinson

A guide to marriage, moving and fatherhood – and also not a bad tool with which to beat your solicitor to death

A review of How to be a husband, by Tim Dowling. There’s only one joke in this 300-page book – that Dowling’s a terrible husband – but it’s a corker

[Getty Images/iStockphoto] 
issue 12 July 2014

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’.

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