What We’re Teaching Our Sons

Come to think of it, we haven’t read The Little Prince either.

We stay awake all night, listening for slight changes in the tone of the engines, for the sounds of structural failure in the airframe, for sudden announcements of catastrophe. We stare down at the lights of cities, watch for panic on the faces of the cabin crew.

We keep pressing the call button to get the attention of the cabin crew.

‘There was a noise,’ we say.

The cabin crew just smile, tell us everything is going to be okay, give us more complimentary drinks.

Our sons, more used to living in the permanent present than we are, alternately sleep or watch cartoons, magnificently unaware of all the disasters that life has planned for them.

The best we can do, we realise, is to keep their hearts from breaking for as long as possible.

The Big Bang (#ulink_8888b9aa-9b1a-5d59-9082-78f3a00c73da)

We’re teaching our sons about the Big Bang.

We’re teaching them about the beginning of space-time, and the birth of the cosmos, and the origins of everything. We’re explaining how reality as we know it probably expanded, by accident, from an infinitely small singularity, on borrowed energy that will eventually have to be paid back. We’re trying to make it clear that we’re all potentially the result of a single overlooked instance of cosmological miscounting.

Somehow, we’ve come on a stag do to Amsterdam with our sons in tow.

It’s not going well.

It’s late in the year and Amsterdam is spectacularly beautiful. Along the Herengracht the low afternoon light paints the tall houses in colours that take our breath away. In the Rijksmuseum, the Vermeers and Rembrandts seem to glow from within. On Keizersgracht the most beautiful women in the world ride past us on vintage bicycles.

But whatever way you look at it, this is no place for fathers to bring their sons.

The older sons want to sneak off and look in the windows of the brothels and hang around outside the sex shows, and the younger ones keep being nearly run over by all the beautiful cyclists.

‘How was the world made?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘How did this all be true? Even before the olden days?’

We try to explain about false vacuums and the weak anthropic principle, about Higgs fields and the arrow of time, but it’s no good. Half the dads have already been out to a coffee shop ‘for a coffee’, and the other half are waiting for their turn.

‘But what about even before then?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘What was there before the bang?’

‘Well, before then … there wasn’t really a then for things to be before.’

Nobody is convinced by that. We don’t blame them. This whole trip was a terrible idea.

A group of the dads has got lost. The combination of all the weed and the conversation about primordial nucleosynthesis in the first seconds of the universe has tipped them over the edge. We send out a search party, roam the beautiful Golden Age streets. We keep getting invited into sex shows, decline politely.

After a couple of hours, we find the missing dads standing in a row outside the windows of a brothel, stoned, staring, confused, at the women in the windows.

We gently guide them away, apologise to everyone.

We haven’t even started on the drinking competitions.

Ex-Girlfriends (#ulink_c71b7ef6-649e-597d-b693-a69a161a9489)

We’re teaching our sons about our ex-girlfriends.

How many of them there have been. What they meant to us. Where it all went wrong, again and again.

We turn up at the doors of our ex-girlfriends with our sons in tow, ask if we can come in and state our cases.

Our sons sit on the sofa, accept offers of juice and biscuits and say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, are generally a credit to us. Our ex-girlfriends entertain the thought, just for a couple of seconds, that we have borrowed or stolen these children in order to impress them. That we are up to our old ways.

We are not up to our old ways.

We are aware of the remarkableness of our ex-girlfriends. We know we are lucky men to have loved and lost such spectacular and interesting women, to be in a position now to try to make amends for all our terrible behaviour.

Our ex-girlfriends are not so easily convinced.

‘What are you doing here?’ they ask. ‘What is this about?’

‘We’re trying to make amends,’ we say, ‘having undertaken a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We want to make up for all the bad things we did back when we were drinking/gambling/on drugs/addicted to sex. For the lies, the betrayals, the constant unreliability, etc.’

Our ex-girlfriends are surprised.

‘You were addicted to sex?’ they ask.

‘Well, no,’ we say. ‘It’s just an example.’

‘Right. Because we probably would have noticed.’

‘Yes.’

Our ex-girlfriends think about it, remembering. Maybe for a bit longer than we’re comfortable with.

‘Now, Steve,’ they say, ‘he was definitely addicted to sex.’

Everyone is quiet for a bit then. Our sons shift their gaze from us to our ex-girlfriends and back again. We had expected this to go differently, if we’re honest. Outside the windows the late October light slowly fails.

‘Well, anyway,’ our ex-girlfriends say, eventually, ‘it was all such a long time ago.’

They see us to the door, thank us for coming, tell our sons what fine young men they are, wish us all the best for the future.

Our sons look at us, about to say what we’re all thinking.

‘Who’s Steve?’ they ask.

The Loneliness of Billionaires (#ulink_e21d34d1-00d3-5510-9489-58b259b8f581)