Читать книгу What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth - Страница 10

We’re teaching our sons about work.

We’re taking them to the office, the factory, the school, the hospital. They’re coming with us on film shoots, on home visits, on our window-cleaning rounds. They’re helping us to study the births and deaths of volcanic islands, to collect unpaid gambling debts, to project-manage billion-pound IT infrastructure transformation programmes.

Other children, we remind our sons, would be excited to see where their fathers work, what they do for a living.

We’re teaching our sons that it’s important to have a vocation. And that even if you don’t have a vocation you still have to turn up every day and pretend you care. We’re teaching our sons about compromise. We’re teaching them how to skive, how to slack off, how to take credit for other people’s work. We’re teaching them how to negotiate pay rises and how to have office affairs.

We tell our sons the stories of our many office affairs, back in the good old, bad old days.

We tell them about our affair with beautiful Stephanie from reception, and the magnificent sunset in Paris, and the helicopter ride, and the horrible accident. We tell them about our affair with Cathy the kickboxing champion, and how it ended with a spectacular roundhouse kick to our head. The gay dads tell the stories of their affairs with Steve and Mark and Sunny and John and David and Disco Clive and the two Andrews. The mothers of our sons, overhearing, start to tell stories of their own wild workplace affairs, their own crazy and dangerous pasts, which makes us all a bit nervous.

We go on for a while, until our sons start to wander off.

They’re convinced they’re going to be film stars and astronauts and famous comic book artists. They’re not interested in all the ways we managed to screw up our stupid lives.