Week Five

Aahhhh! My last post was a weekly update and my newest one is too - pretty poor work on my part, and I can almost feel the wheels falling off of my once-daily blogging habit. However, I knew full well that I was over-committing on the blogging front, so let’s not get too disheartened. Instead, let’s focus on what I spent week five of my parental leave up to…

Public Speaking

The fairly major thing that I did was travel to Oxford on Monday, and give a public talk on the Tuesday (heading back home on the Wednesday). As I previously referenced, major kudos to my wife for making this happen. Even more major kudos as I just took my oldest two to swimming and found the showering bit basically impossible, so to think she did it with a baby strapped to her…well, major kudos.

You can see the video of the talk here and I’m pretty happy with how it went. Lots of questions and interactions, and a couple of new ideas for me to follow up on. I love my trips to Oxford - the city is buzzing with intellectual activity and it’s hard not to be inspired by the surroundings and the activity. I wish I could spend more time there, but it’s just not practical at the moment. Maybe I should have done this DPhil either before having children, or much later on, when they don’t take so much hands-on work.

I visited Exeter College bar with one of my supervisors which was pretty fun, spent an evening reading a book in the Turf Tavern which was a delightful treat, stayed in Palmer’s Tower at Exeter College which was cool, and spent an hour working in the Rad Cam. All-in-all, a fruitful trip.

Family Visiting

I visited my family over the weekend, and it was a lovely trip. My kids love their grandparents and the feeling is clearly mutual. I got to see lots of my brother and my baby niece, and we went to soft-play and learned forward rolls and went down slides for the first time and had a first park trip and…well, we lived. My dad’s health isn’t great so it feels important to make the most of trips like this and squeeze out every bit of quality family time that we can.

The Manosphere

Like most people on the internet seemed to have, I watched Louis Theroux’s documentary on the Manosphere with great interest. It brought to mind a real anxiety I have of parenting: friends with older children say that there’s much less ‘hands-on’ work as the children get older, but the stakes are much higher and you have much less direct control. You don’t have to take your children to the toilet and they don’t need you so often and immediately, but they can enter the manosphere and you can’t just pull them out of it.

I hope that I’d be able to calmly and clearly reason a teenager out of that by appealing to logic and reason. But even as I write that, I realise how silly it sounds and how hopeless being the parent of a spiralling teenager must feel.

I try to have some sympathy with those who fall into the manosphere and broadly I succeed - young men need role models and often have a pretty tough deal in life. I agree with Caitlin Moran’s view (in What About Men?) that men could do with the male equivalent of feminism. And I sincerely hope that the manosphere isn’t that equivalent.

## Conclusion

I managed to get to the gym once, took most of my vitamins, and ticked off a big item (a public talk at Oxford University). I also spent plenty of time with the kids and my family. Next week has much less stuff booked, so let’s hope I can do more gymming and make the most of week six!