What We’re Teaching Our Sons

Gambling (#litres_trial_promo)

Food (#litres_trial_promo)

The Life-Saving Properties of Books (#litres_trial_promo)

Crime (#litres_trial_promo)

Glaciers (#litres_trial_promo)

What Happens When You Get Struck by Lightning (#litres_trial_promo)

The World’s Most Dangerous Spiders (#litres_trial_promo)

Friendship (#litres_trial_promo)

Single Mothers (#litres_trial_promo)

The Conquest of the South Pole (#litres_trial_promo)

Monsters (#litres_trial_promo)

Romance (#litres_trial_promo)

Nostalgia (#litres_trial_promo)

Practical Life Skills (#litres_trial_promo)

Teenage Girls (#litres_trial_promo)

The Abominable Snowman (#litres_trial_promo)

Violence (#litres_trial_promo)

Rites of Passage (#litres_trial_promo)

Vikings (#litres_trial_promo)

The Particular Smell of Hospitals at Three in the Morning (#litres_trial_promo)

The War Against the Potato Beetle (#litres_trial_promo)

Relativity (#litres_trial_promo)

Pirates (#litres_trial_promo)

Hotels (#litres_trial_promo)

The Aftermath of Disasters (#litres_trial_promo)

Drinking (#litres_trial_promo)

The Pointlessness of Guilt (#litres_trial_promo)

War (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fifteen Foolproof Approaches to Making Someone Fall in Love with You (#litres_trial_promo)

Life (#litres_trial_promo)

The Wonderful Colours of the Non-Neurotypical Spectrum (#litres_trial_promo)

Martians (#litres_trial_promo)

The Ones that Got Away (#litres_trial_promo)

Video Games (#litres_trial_promo)

The Extinction of the Dinosaurs (#litres_trial_promo)

Art (#litres_trial_promo)

Women, Again (#litres_trial_promo)

The Importance of Good Posture and Looking After your Teeth (#litres_trial_promo)

Fatherhood (#litres_trial_promo)

Death (#litres_trial_promo)

Ghosts (#litres_trial_promo)

The Ultimate Fate of the Universe (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

The Great Outdoors (#ue54592e8-63b5-5fb6-ac8c-cfdb8202e3e2)

We’re teaching our sons about the great outdoors.

We’re teaching them how to appreciate the natural world, how to understand it, how to survive in it. As concerned fathers have apparently been teaching their sons since the Palaeolithic.

We’re teaching our sons how to make fires and lean-to shelters, how to tie twenty-five different kinds of knot, how to construct animal traps from branches and vines. We’re teaching them how to catch things, how to kill things, how to gut things. Out on the frozen marshes before dawn we produce hundreds of rabbits out of sacks, try to show our sons how to skin the rabbits.

Our sons look over our shoulders, distracted by the beautiful sunrise. They don’t want anything to do with skinning rabbits.