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It’s today guys. What did you do to celebrate?
In honour of the momentous day, The Problem With Men is only 99p this weekend as an ebook.
Get it here (for example).
Just like last year I chose to mark International Men’s Day by encouraging people to nominate a man they admired on Twitter. This year I chose Rik Mayall, who brought so much joy and anarchy to the world, but also inspired me to do the job I do now. I regret not talking to him the one time I (almost) met him,
when he was in the queue ahead of me at the BP on Shepherds Bush Green.
Loads of people joined in and the results were moving and funny and sad, but it was a very positive experience which makes you wonder what the world would be like if social media was like this all the time. The negativity and calling people out doesn’t really do much. Retweeting and critiquing extreme views only amplifies them. Even if nine out of ten people agree that something is ridiculous or atrocious, it just takes one out of ten to be hooked into it for the awful opinion/conspiracy theory to grow. That bit of the Jon Ronson podcast which revealed that the protests against the anti-abortion rallies were the tipping point that actually got people behind the rallies keeps playing on my mind.
Anyway, nearly everyone entered the spirit and there was almost no people tweeting criticism of other people’s choices of great men - and being a great person isn’t about always being perfect, it’s about doing your best and learning from your inevitable mistakes.
I picked the kids up from school and took them into town to buy them some treats. They both got great reports and have been mainly good (nobody’s perfect) and coincidentally were both Stars of the Week in their classes this week. I took them to WH Smiths, which was the ultimate treat for me as a child, though I feel Smiths has lost its crown in the kingdom of the High Street. In the 70s and 80s I spent my book tokens there, bought all my stuff for the new school year and bought my first singles. It had everything. But now it has lost its lustre. Has it changed or have I? Both, but definitely Smiths is not as good. But the kids wee impressed with the range of magazines and they were still able to pick up some nice pens and stickers and they were happy with their purchases.
I doubt Smiths will be as much of an exciting venue as it was for me in Weston-Super-Mare (mind you it was in Woolworths that I saw Don Estelle and Youngsters where I bought Hugo so I shopped around) and I hope not because it’s rubbish now and there’s so much more choice, but it was fun to make this little link through the generations. My kids get way more stuff than I did, mainly because I am a much less effective parent than my parents and easily manipulated into adding one more item into the basket. But it’s a small price to pay for leaving the kids with an unusable planet (though to be fair, buying them more pens probably hasn’t helped with that).
