pseudo human being...

Back in the day, it was an iPod that was my first introduction to Apple.  It was one of those rare devices that absolutely and immediately changed my life: in this case, by completely revolutionising the way that I listened to music.  I was one of those kids who was always taping things off the radio; I made mixtapes for people well into my 20s (it seems ridiculous to think about it now, but writable CDs weren't really a thing for most people for a really, really long time.  Long after all my music was on CDs, the only really practical way of making a compilation was to use a cassette).  I had a minidisc for a while, and that was okay but distinctly limited by the fact that not many people had minidisc players.... which may be at least part of the reason why that didn't really work out as a format.

Anyway....

I think my first iPod had a capacity of 30gb and I was suddenly able to carry around so much more music in my pocket... although, because my music was almost entirely on CD, I also had to learn how to rip CDs into MP3s first.  I then had to buy and install a firewire connection for my PC to be able to connect my new device to my computer.  I don't know about you, but how many times have you opened up a PC and installed a card? I worked in IT and it was my first time.  On top of all that, Apple hadn't made a version of iTunes for the PC yet, either... so I was forced to use something called "Media Jukebox" by JRiver (I haven't used this in over a decade and I think they still send me emails).  So I started ripping CDs onto my hard drive, and the choices I made then can still be seen in my library of MP3s today: every new CD that I bought was ripped immediately, but I selectively went back through my back catalogue, and loads of the CDs I didn't rip then have never been added since. The process of ripping a CD took ages on my old PC, and I just didn't have the time or patience to rip my way through a back catalogue of 1000 or so CDs... so I made some choices, and I'm still living with those choices today.  I guess I'm a completist, but not *that much* of a completist. Pah.  Evict me from the man club.

iTunes arrived for the PC eventually, and I moved my library over and downloaded my first track from the Apple Store.  79p for "Vertigo" by U2.

I loved the old iPod.  Even when Apple did everything they could to move us into newer technology, I loved being able to buy a device that had storage big enough that it was capable of holding my whole music library and I didn't have to choose what I loaded.  For me, the 160Gb iPod classic was where it was at.  I had an iPhone and used that for my day-to-day consumption of music, choosing playlists and albums that I wanted to carry with me all the time... safe in the knowledge that I always had my classic, and my classic had everything.

...and then Apple stopped making it.

Lots of people made a massive fuss about this and seemed angry at Apple for taking this choice away from them.  I sort of understood where they were coming from, but what the hell did they expect Apple to do about it?  They'd decided to move on, and that was that.  I was a touch worried that I wouldn't have the choice of something with this much storage, but my (second) classic was still pretty new, so it wasn't something I needed to lose any sleep over quite yet.

When we went on holiday to Switzerland and Austria this summer, we were going to be driving around everywhere, and I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to some music, so I packed the classic.  In truth, I'd been using the playlists on my iPhone more and more, but I still liked the idea of something with everything; something that had the whole of "Surf's Up" by the Beach Boys and not just a playlist of the band's greatest hits.  I quickly discovered something that Apple already knew: the iPod classic has a spinning hard drive and not solid state storage; it's built on old technology... and in the car we were using, it was painfully slow and crashed every couple of songs, requiring a full reset each time.  Needless to say, I just used my phone for music.  Suddenly, the iPod classic felt every bit an almost obsolete piece of technology.

Imagine my delight when I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 7 and discovered that I once again had a device with the storage capacity to easily hold my entire music collection.  In fact, the 256Gb storage capacity of my new phone is in fact significantly bigger than the 160Gb of my old iPod classic.

Technology, eh?

Naturally, in the time since I've started curating a digital music collection on my hard drive, I've bought a record player and started buying 180g vinyl, sometimes of music that I already own on cassette, CD and on MP3.

That's just the way of the world though, eh?

send this one out to the old school....

This is a massive few weeks for new releases: this coming Monday alone sees the release of both the New Daft Punk album, "Random Access Memories", and "Trouble Will Find Me" by the National.  Last Monday saw the release of Vampire Weekend's third album, "Modern Vampires of the City".  The schedules are packed with decent music just waiting to be released.

I don't know about you, but I always feel that this now produces something of a dilemma: CD or download?  Instinctively, I'm still the kind of person who likes to buy a physical copy and file it in the appropriate place on the shelves with my other CDs.  Some of my friends have got to the point where they've more or less sold or given away their entire collection of CDs, but I've got hundreds and hundreds of them and have no intention of getting rid of them any time soon.

That said, my consumption of music is now almost entirely digital.  Even when I have a physical copy, the very first thing that I will do with it is to rip it into iTunes and add it to my music library.  The CD itself may never actually get played before it gets put onto the shelf, and I will listen to the MP3 file either streamed to some speakers from my laptop or by using an iPod/iPhone.  I used to have a little wallet of CDs that I kept in the car, but these days it's just a simple cable and we're good to go with an iPhone wired directly into the car sound system.  That CD wallet is now kicking around inside the house somewhere, with the CDs still in it from the last time it was used.  Here it is..... Gorillaz, Rufus Wainwright, Snow Patrol, Arctic Monkeys, Beatles, Billy Joel, Kings of Leon, Killers, Editors, Moby, Radiohead.... so about 2005, I would say.  I've never even bothered to put the CDs back in their cases.

I suppose it's true that I quite like having a physical copy as backup.  I do buy and download music all the time, but I'm not quite at a place where I entirely feel comfortable putting my whole music collection into the cloud.  Some stuff, yes... and instant gratification is a marvellous thing, and back catalogue albums are often ridiculously cheap to download too (especially if you shop around).   But as I sat in front of Amazon the other day wondering if I should buy a CD or just pre-order the download of Monday's new releases, the price difference wasn't big enough to make me feel like I was wasting money on a physical copy.  So I bought the CDs.

Besides, I kind of like having them around.

It's only a few months since we put a new shelving system into my cave to allow me to put all my CDs and books and things in one place.  It had been stressing me out for months that, if I wanted to put my hand onto my copy of "Graceland", one of the many albums in my collection that I've never quite got around to ripping, then I didn't know immediately where it was.  Now I do, and when I last fancied listening to it, I pulled it down, ripped it, put it back on the shelf and then streamed the music from my laptop through my good speakers.  Job done.

Apple TV is slowly starting to change the way I consume films - I bought my first ever film in the cloud the other day, "Batman: the Dark Knight Returns part 1".  It sits on Apple's servers and can be downloaded onto any of my devices at any time, but I do not possess a physical copy.  At the moment, that's the exception rather than the rule in my collection, and it's a slightly odd feeling, but it is SOOOOOO convenient.  Storage is cheap, but I don't want a de-facto set of servers in my house and I'm more than happy to outsource that service to Apple or to Amazon to do it for me.  I've never really got into Spotify, but I imagine it's a similar sort of thing.

Ah, but I'm only renting content and who is to say that these companies can't strip it away from me at any time.  Well, let's not forget that I bought the original Star Wars trilogy about four times in different formats and in different versions.  Just because I owned it on VHS didn't stop me buying it again on DVD.... this isn't really so different to that, is it?  I suppose I could have held onto my VHS player, but I willingly upgraded to something else.

Anyway.  What do you do? Do you download everything or are you a (mostly) luddite like me?   Thinking about it, it's probably just as well that I never got into vinyl.  Can you imagine what my house would look like now?  Didn't John Peel's house need reinforcing to support the weight of all his music collection?  Well, maybe not quite that....

Incidentally, on the subject of my new shelves....

.....now that's what I call a proper bookshelf.  It's not a man cave without many virtually identical books  of cricket statistics (and some Shakespeare folios).

whatta a mighty good man....

One of my oldest friends is getting married in October.

Although I'm delighted for him, obviously I've been taking the piss.  To be honest, it's a little like shooting fish in a barrel: he's got a website with a countdown clock (124 days to go!), video invites and everything....  but that's all the more reason, right?

Anyway.

I was out in town the other day, when I saw a set of products that made me think of the wedding.

I took the snap and immediately sent it to my friend with an accompanying message:
"I assume you have the whole diamante socks/pants thing well in hand?"
...you know, they've got everything else covered, etc.  I'm a funny guy, no?  I nearly caused a panic a few weeks earlier when I was visiting the happy couple and I innocently asked if it was a hat wedding.
The Bride-to-Be stared at me.  "What's a hat wedding?"  I could see the panic behind her eyes at the thought that she might have missed something.  A few days later, I got a very serious message telling me that apparently lots of other people would be wearing hats, but it was up to us if we wanted to wear one or  not.

Like I said, fish in a barrel.

A response to my message quickly came back:
"Where on earth do you spend your Saturdays?"

Ooh.  Good comeback.  Straight onto the front foot.  You see, at this point, I should have maintained a dignified silence.  Explanation is only going to make me look bad, and the gag wasn't at my expense....So I immediately sent a message back with an attempted explanation:
"It's the lingerie shop where C. orders her bras and stuff.  After I've watched NZ v Ireland, obviously".  Do you like how I've managed to mention that I've already got in a good man activity that morning.  I'm all testosterone, me.
"A. goes to places like that with the girls!

Dammit!  No more explaining. NO. MORE. EXPLAIN....

"Well, it was on the way to the Farmers' Market and she was picking up an order, in my defence.  To boost my man credentials, I'm going to look at HDTVs now"

Ugh.  Game over.

A week later and I'm still trying to work out how I came out of that exchange looking bad.  After all, it's not me with the wedding website with the countdown clock, is it (124 days to go!)? Fish in a barrel!  Fish in a barrel!

Still, on the plus side, I now have a new telly.

war pigs....

When I first bought a Playstation 3, a few months ago now, I picked up several games to get me started. As things turned out, in practice I spent almost all of my time playing Batman: Arkham City and the other games barely got a look in. As one of my colleagues remarked, Batman was so good that the danger was that I was immediately setting the bar impossibly high.

Arkham City is indeed a brilliant game – perhaps the best I’ve ever played in a gaming history that runs from Chuckie Egg and Yie Ar Kung Fu on the Spectrum all the way through several PCs and the first two generations of Playstation. Well, I say it’s the best game I’ve played, but to be honest I’ve still got a massive soft spot for some of the early incarnations of Championship Manager…. And for Bard’s Tale on the Amstrad. Well, and perhaps the old Hobbit strategy game too (“Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold....”)

I digress.

I reached (more or less) the end of the main storyline on Arkham City last week. I’m only about 50% of the way through the game, but once Batman walked out of the prison compound after completing what turned out to be the final mission, I realised I was going to have to play the game all over again… this time paying more attention to the side plots and extra bits. Not a problem, but I wanted a bit of a break first.

I popped Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on and thought I’d have a crack at something else for a bit. 

I’d read a lot about this game before buying my console, and by all accounts it was amazing, so decided to give it a go.  The bargain price-point certainly helped....

This isn't a new game by any stretch of the imagination (2007), but it was immediately clear that technology has moved on a long way since the shoot’em ups I used to play on my Amstrad back in the day and I quickly found myself immersed in a world of hyper-realistic military conflict. I finished the game (on the easiest setting) before the end of the same weekend, but I was troubled.

It was two things that bothered me really:

1) That the game is essentially set now and the plot revolves around SAS or US Marine Special Forces units carrying out missions against either Russian Ultranationalists or Middle Eastern terrorists. Obviously, no actual organisations are mentioned by name, but I was mildly uncomfortable with the politics of “good” and “bad” as displayed in the game. It’s one thing taking out aliens or zombies and quite another thing to be taking out something so rooted in contemporary politics. Covert assassination missions in the Ukraine? I’m far too wishy-washy a liberal to want any part of that.

And I had to shoot some dogs too.

2) The graphic violence (when combined with the realistic setting). This is a game that rewards efficient killing, and a shot to the head results in a spatter of blood as you take your enemy down. At one point, a tricky sniper shot was rewarded by blowing someone’s arm clean off. This can’t be doing me any good, right? The most troubling mission of all was one where I was manning the gun on a air support mission for a team on the ground. My view was a choice of either light or dark infrared, and I could select between three calibres of gun to support my colleagues on the ground, ranging from a machine gun that strafed a small area, or some quite heavy weaponry that took out everything in about a 50m radius. This was beautifully realised, and looked almost identical to the footage you sometimes see on the news of bombing missions. Very impressive… right down to the human bodies being flung out of the blast radius as I cleared a path for my guys on the ground. Most troubling of all was that this was probably the mission that I enjoyed the most.

Obviously, the fact that I played the game all the way through over a day or so doesn’t give me a great deal of moral high ground here, and I fully intend to go back in and play it on a harder setting too. It’s a fantastic game…. But it bothers me. It’s clearly a step up from attending the games at the Circus in Roman times and cheering as actual people get torn apart, but just how far a step up is it really?

…and don’t even get me started on morals of the multi-player game that sees people gleefully tearing each other apart and then posing over the corpse for the benefit of the kill-cam view for the recently killed player (And to think that we wonder at the behaviour of some of our troops towards captured or killed enemies during an actual war.  Although, to be fair, I did also read an article the other day about how games like these can lead to altruistic behaviour amongst gamers....)

Batman was violent, but at least it was always non-lethal violence. Maybe I’m too sensitive for this kind of thing and should stick to sports sims.  Is this sort of gaming a reflection of our society?

*ponders whilst applying camo paint and a ghillie suit, grabbing an assault rifle, a few flash-bangs and heading back into battle*

but now and then we wonder who the real men are....

I reckon there's a gap in the market for a proper handbook for men; a MANual, if you will....

I'm 37 years old and you would imagine that I would be getting the hang of things by now, but this simply isn't true.  Apart from anything else, growing this beard has been a voyage of discovery for me pretty much right from the start.

- Why does no one tell you the point at which stubble stops and a beard starts?
- Why has it come out less grey than the rest of the hair on my head?
- To trim or not to trim?
- What do you trim with? How short? How often?
- How far down your throat should you let it grow?
- What about the stubble that grows high up on your cheek bones?
- How long should I expect it to be itchy for?
- What strategies are there to avoid stroking or pulling it all the time?
- Why should growing one be so fascinating to other people?
- What's the etiquette around letting people touch it?
- Beard envy from other guys.  What's that all about?
- Should people not be forewarned about how weird it feels on your pillow?
- Is this actually going to keep my face warmer on the ski slopes?

...and so on.

Every day that I keep this thing, new questions keep popping into my head.  I'm hardly the first man to go through this, and I surely can't be the only one to wonder about these and other important questions of beard etiquette.

Can I?

Or does this handbook for men already exist and I've just missed it?

Or is it passed down, word-of-mouth, from generation to generation?  Did my father neglect to pass this information down to me, or is the knowledge slowly being lost to us men as we lead ever more urban and metrosexual lives where more attention is paid to styling mousse than to basic beard growth and maintenance?

O Tempora, O Mores!

Where did all the real men go?

smell my beard....

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I appear to be growing a beard.

My last proper shave was (I think) on the morning of Wednesday 22nd December. The inevitable consequence of this is that, over the course of the last 20 days, I’ve now got an honest-to-goodness beard.

(when Peter Jackson filmed Lord of the Rings, he needed to give Ian McKellan a false nose to make sure that his face didn't disappear into his Gandalf beard.... not a problem I think he'd have with me.)

It started out of laziness, of course. I don’t particularly enjoy shaving, and when I have a few days off work, I tend to let my stubble grow. Like lots of blokes, I reckon I look better with a hint of stubble… maybe two or three days worth. After that, it starts getting a bit itchy and/or I have to go back to work, so I have a shave. This time, I had a clear ten days off work and I just didn’t bother shaving at all. By the time I was due to go back to work on 3rd January, I had enough of a beard that I was prepared to run the inevitable gauntlet of banter and give it another couple of weeks. We’re going skiing towards the end of January, I thought, so why not go with a beard? Every time we go skiing, I come back with what looks like an identical set of photos of us wearing the same skiing gear standing with the same friends on a snowy mountain somewhere. Why not shake that up a bit by going with a beard?

Alright. It’s not much of a reason, I grant you, but there you go.

So I went to work with a beard.

Apparently, bearded men tend to get passed over for promotion more frequently than the clean-shaven. Well, that’s hardly likely to make much of a difference to the glacial rate of progression of my brilliant career, is it? Plus I decided that I simply didn’t care what people thought.

As it turned out, I received nothing but positive comments – almost to the extent that I began to wonder what was wrong with my face before. I’d sort of assumed that a beard would be a guy thing and that most ladies would be generally disapproving. As it turns out, I’ve had a surprising number of compliments from my female colleagues. Most are concerned that I keep it trimmed and don’t allow it to become a free-range, ZZ Top-style affair, but otherwise they seem to like it. Even my wife – who hated my 2008 Movember moustache – seems to have surprised herself by how much she likes it. Well, tolerates it.

I keep surprising myself too; I keep walking past mirrors, catching sight of myself, and thinking “Ooooh! You’ve got a beard!” as though this was a remarkable thing for a man of my age to be able to do. In my own head, I’m still about 16 years old, like most men, and the ability to grow hair on my face still seems an astonishing thing to be able to do. Tina asked me here over the weekend if I’d been out running on Trent Bridge at about noon on Sunday as she’d seen a tall, bearded man jogging as she drove into town. It was me, of course, but it still took a few seconds for the novelty of being described as a “bearded man” to sink in.

Ridiculous. I’m 37 years old. Why should my ability to grow a beard be remarkable to anyone, myself included?

And then, just when I thought I’d done all the hard bits of growing a beard, a colleague of mine returned from holiday today and paused for a moment as he tried to remember who he thought I now looked like.

“Oh. I know…” said the Weapon of the Zombie Apocalypse after some consideration, “…you look like Sir Clive Sinclair”.

Reader, I nearly shaved on the spot… but then another colleague (separately, but also today) came up and told me that, with a trim and a black polo-neck, I’d be a dead-ringer for Steve Jobs. Now that’s a bit more like it. An improvement, anyway. Unless he meant Steve Jobs now…

To be honest, I was really going for a Leonidas…..maybe the beard just needs a little more time and then - what with my physique and all - everyone will be making that comparison.

I think I’ll keep it until we’re back from Austria on 28th January, but after that I reckon it will go. Still, it’s something every guy should do at least once in their lives, eh? If for no other reason than because we can.

It’s a man thing.

Obviously.

Besides, as Kristen Wiig shows here with Zach Galifianiakis, beards are sexy.....

[GJ thinks I look like this guy.  I'm not having it.  I think I'd rather look like Sir Clive Sinclair]

ever dance with the devil in the pale moon light?

I'm Batman.

Yesterday evening, I spent a long tiring time chasing Penguin and his goons through the Arkham City museum in Gotham.  I had to silently take out his thugs, one by one, to rescue their cop hostages.  I had to avoid the shark (a shark! I had to punch out a shark!) lurking in the frozen monsters from the deep exhibition to find where Mr. Freeze was being held hostage by Cobblepot.  Once I'd found Freeze, I needed to try and get the antidote I need from him.  Then I needed to battle past the giant one-armed psychopath with the scythe to get to the Penguin.  Finally, I needed to get past a drug-enraged Solomon Grundy and work out how to disable Penguin's freeze gun to deliver the knock-out blow.

All of that was fine.

You know what really upset me?

When I reached Penguin, he tossed insults at me as I tried to get close enough to him.  Okay.  To be expected from a master criminal, I suppose.  I'm a big, grown-up superhero.  I can handle that kind of stuff. 

....and then he called me a wanker.

WTF?

As I died shortly afterwards, I had another chance to listen and see if my ears were deceiving me.  Nope.  He definitely called me a wanker. Even as I took him down, I was outraged.

A wanker?  Me?  Seriously? What on earth is the world coming to where diminutive super villains can abuse the Dark Knight like this?  Who does he think he is?  Who does he think I am?

I love this game.  I've been playing for hours and I'm something like 12% of the way through.

Tonight, I will be on the trail of the League of Assassins in an attempt to get a blood sample from Ras al Ghul.

I am 37 years old.

Eat my shorts.

---

Also this evening, I learned how to tie a proper bow tie.  Badly, I admit.... but I learned (thanks lovely Charles!).  Luckily, my clever wife learned faster and more effectively than me, and we should be able to make me look half-respectable for the ball we're going to tomorrow night.  Well, the tie might look half-respectable, anyway.

from fine old kegs, from the brim to the dregs....

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

1 Corinthians 13:11

Wrong.  In my case, anyway.

I'm 37 now, and I caught myself wondering the other day if I would ever really be a grown-up.  My hair is falling out, I'm turning pretty grey (grey chest hair?  seriously? WTF?) and I like to have a good nap of an evening whilst sitting on the sofa in front of the telly.... I also own a house, have a proper (well, it's full-time) job and am legally considered a responsible enough adult to work with children - they actually gave me a certificate to prove it, as if they thought I might be challenged on that fact.

Do I consider myself to be a grown-up?  Mmmm.  Not really. 

Does anyone?  Do you?

I want to buy a Playstation 3.  I am going to buy a Playstation 3.  And most likely also various games that involve either hitting balls, finding treasure by solving fiendishly conceived puzzles in exotic locations around the world or wearing a cape and saving Gotham City. 

C. has just signed up for a degree course at the Open University to occupy her spare time; I'm thinking about dedicating that same spare time to going online to pretend to be a special forces soldier blowing up strangers in impressive ways using an arsenal of fearsome weaponry.  Hmm.  Maybe it's a man thing. 

Do you ever reach a point where you consider yourself too grown-up for these things?  Is it dignified that a man of nearly 40 years of age doesn't consider himself to have got there yet, and doesn't anticipate getting there any time soon? 

It's not that I especially care what you think of failure to put aside my childish ways, you understand.  I'm just curious if you feel the same.

Also, who wants to play FIFA, Call of Duty or Tiger Woods or something online with me? 

You can do that now, right?

I got chills....

I can't really think of a single concrete justification for needing one, but I am finding myself strangely drawn towards the new iPad.

When the original came out last year, I played with one for a while in an Apple store in San Francisco. It surfed the internet nicely enough, but it seemed a little heavy in my hand after even a couple of minutes use. I loved my iPhone, but the iPad seemed like a really cool device that didn't really have a compelling raison d'etre, and Apple seemed to be hoping to find one post-launch.

I saw one in use a few months later, on our trip to SE Asia. One of the guys we were travelling with would use it to read books and to edit the photos and videos he was taking as we went on our way around Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. I get the video editing bit (although I'm also pretty sure that it could have waited until he got back home, and that his friends could have lived without daily Facebook video updates) but I don't really see the iPad as a practical e-reader. This guy took his iPad to the beach one day, but he found that it was both too hot and too bright to practically use the device. Marissa's kindle was fine in the same conditions. When I got home, I wanted a kindle, not an iPad. I know a kindle doesn't have as much capability as an iPad, but it's a whole lot better at doing the one thing that it's really designed to do..... Mind you, on the flight on the way home, when the only film showing on the big screen was "Furry Vengeance", I suddenly understood what the iPad is for when I trudged wearily down to back of the plane and saw someone curled up in their seat underneath a blanket, with their iPad propped up in front of them, watching a film of THEIR choosing.

So, now the new one is out. I played with one in an Apple store when we were in New York the other week, and the new model seemed a lot lighter in the hand. I browsed the Guardian website, and it was great.... as an iPhone user, it's not the biggest leap of the imagination to find the interface on an iPad an entirely intuitive way to navigate around a website.

I'm sure they're great, but what would I use one for really? They seemed to have plenty in stock, but I still didn't want one.

Not two weeks later, now I'm back in the UK, where prices are the same in £ as they were in $ in New York, and where it's impossible to get hold of one anyway.... suddenly I find that I kind of want one.

I'm not saying I'm going to rush out and buy one or anything.... I'm just acknowledging that something in my head has changed. I can't rationalise it, but it's there.

WANT.

I'm a man, that's what I am.....

One of the unexpected benefits of getting the loft converted is that I'm apparently now going to get a proper man space in the house. I've had a cave since we first moved in: home to the bulk of my CDs, my separates stereo, a pile of my books, my desk, an old telly and one of my computers. The walls are covered with pictures of Andrew Flintoff, The Beatles, Muhammad Ali, Han Solo and Morrissey/Marr. There's even a beer fridge in there. It's meant to be a proper man space, but sadly for me, it hasn't really worked out like that. The room has served as our main spare room, and although the futon in there spends most of its life folded up as a sofa and not rolled out as a bed, it effectively blocks access to the CD racks and the stereo; there's no real signal on the tv and the beer fridge is sadly empty and unplugged most of the time. Since I've had a laptop and no longer need to sit at the desk, I don't really spend much time in there at all.

The addition of a new room in the house has now moved the goalposts: the room in the loft is now very much our guest room. It has a double-bed and an en-suite bathroom. This means, so I was informed this evening, that we don't need to keep a futon in my cave any more, and we can get a chair, put in some more book and CD shelves, shift the stereo and speakers somewhere more central to the room for optimal listening, perhaps get a decent telly, another sky box and a DVD player.... the world is suddenly my oyster.

What I really want, and all I really need, is a room where I will be happy to spend some time: somewhere I can sit in a chair and listen to music, watch some telly and to read some books. But can I really leave it there? As a man, do I not have some kind of obligation to pack the room full of all kinds of other stuff?

I throw the question open to the floor: what else should go in that room? What else does any self-respecting man room need? A drumkit? A moose head? A gun cabinet? A fully functioning casino? A full-size snooker table? A grotto with lake and a cascading waterfall?

You tell me......