The Men Commandments

Between you and me, my brother-in-law and I had discovered that you can instant message each other on a Nintendo DS. (Well, the kids had shown us – we didn’t discover it. The boy is the father of the man.) Hey presto, within seconds of finding this out we were sending vulgar messages to each other on them while sitting among relatives.

I’d imagine this happens at those UN meetings. Gordon Brown sending Sarkozy a note saying ‘Check out the baba jangers on the babe from Slovenia!’ or ‘Don’t fancy yours much’ and nodding at the delegate from Albania.

It transformed the dreaded post-turkey slump into playground fun. My brother-in-law laughed too loudly though. Schoolboy error.

It drew attention to us and the game was up. To this day it’s recalled frequently by my wife. I’ll take the content of those vulgar messages to my grave. Giggling.

COOKING

I have a friend who is a former Royal Marine Commando, now working as a bodyguard in Afghanistan. A tough guy. Last year, after coming home from a three-month spell away, we went out for drinks. Much later, he was dropped off at home, takeaway Chinese in hand, which he duly ate while his wife was sleeping peacefully upstairs.

Sadly my friend was in a rather confused state (maybe post-traumatic stress disorder, or possibly that extra Stella) and, seeking something to wipe his dirty Chinese sweet and sour hands on, mistook his wife’s newly purchased white jacket for a tea towel. In the morning he was awoken by a blood-curdling cry to rival anything he had faced in Afghanistan or Iraq from the mullahs. He had a fear like he had never known before. The immediate discussion of course centred on why whenever he saw his mates he ‘needed to get in such a terrible state’.

I remember meeting up with my best mate Phil and returning home slightly the worse for wear. Putting on all the lights in every single room, I then started to cook. Men often like to cook when drunk. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a drunken guy with the munchies started the Great Fire of London in 1666.

As I was throwing random ingredients into a pan, which I then planned to put between two slices of bread, my lovely wife was upstairs asking in strong Anglo-Saxon terms what was going on and could I just ‘get the fuck to bed’. Why don’t women just say what they mean?

Feeling a bit sorry for myself, I went and chatted to my dog Digby, who has never used language like that and doesn’t judge me. (Dogs don’t – that’s why they are man’s best friend. Cats are judgemental little shits.) And as I was chatting to him, I was struck by how warm and cosy his dog bed was.

The next thing I remember is seeing daylight and my wife towering over me in her dressing gown. Digby was on the other side of the room looking at me as disapprovingly as a little dog (not too little, though – no man should own a small yappy dog) can. Digby wasn’t happy.

And it’s not just because a few weeks earlier I let my wife get his balls cut off. I picked him up from the vet’s and the look in his eyes will stay with me for ever. It wasn’t just the pain and disappointment that any man could do this to another man, all be it a man-dog. It was as if he was saying, ‘It could be you next.’ My wife said getting him done would calm him down, and stop him having sex with any passing dog and urinating on the furniture. My God, I suddenly realised, she wants MY balls removed, she wants my sacred man purse lopped off. To control me; to stop me urinating on the couch (which was an accident).

Think about it. What woman wouldn’t want their man neutered? I bet there are back-street man-neutering clinics springing up all over the place right now. An illicit underground network. Run by man-hating women using very rusty implements. With little or no anaesthetic. This explains those too-good-to-be-true men you hear all about from your wife.

‘Well, Gill’s husband loves going clothes shopping with her and picking out new curtains.’

He’s been neutered. You see the neutered men every Saturday limping a few feet behind their women in shopping centres. Thousand-yard stares. I’ve stumbled on a big global conspiracy here. I bet Bill Clinton has been neutered by now. Just look at the poor fella. That Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced New York governor caught using prostitutes (at least, unlike our feckless MPs, he didn’t claim it on his expenses), was probably neutered the moment that public apology was done.

No, the real reason Digby is on my wife’s side is that I had slept in his bed that night. A dog bed. That really stinks. The sight that greeted my wife was of a pissed-off-looking dog and my head and shoulders in the dog basket, with the rest of me a tangled heap looking as if I had fallen from a great height. All the lights were still on and for some reason there were spaghetti hoops in my hands.

‘Nice seeing your mates again?’

THE SEXY BLACK WIDOW SYNDROME

Women think they have smarter, more emotionally mature relationships than we do with our mates. Bollocks. It runs deeper than a headlock. A bit.

Sure, when guys get together alcohol is often involved and as a consequence so is stupidity. This doesn’t help the case for more Mate Time. When women get together, a nice civilised coffee and a Danish is enough. I sometimes envy the simplicity of this. No need for vomiting and hangovers. None of those conversations around midnight about jacking it all in and starting a business together selling monkey butlers door to door.

Don’t be fooled, though. Ladies’ conversation is rarely civilised. Gossip and bitching. And you know what they discuss when they go to the toilets together? Us. And our winkies. I wonder if other animals do this?

Sexy Black Widow 1: You should have seen the tackle on the one I had last night! Hung like a gnat.

Sexy Black Widow 2: Ha ha ha! Last night’s date ended with him crying, saying, ‘This doesn’t normally happen,’ as his web shot off real quick. How I laughed as I ate him…

All Sexy Black Widows together: Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

THE VICIOUSNESS OF WOMEN

I would take my relationship with my mates over women’s any day.

I’m serious. A man can break a woman’s heart but that is nothing compared to the vicious damage women regularly inflict on each other. Smiling assassins. All nice to their faces but hidden away with another friend/witch and the gloves are off. If Goodfellas had been Goodgirls the violence would have been far worse. With hair straighteners and nail files.

‘You’re saying I’ve put on weight? Put on weight how? How exactly do you find me weighty?’

Men can be cruel to each other but they do it to each other’s face. Dignified. Your clothes, hair, beer gut, bald spot, wife, girlfriend, football team, birth place, penis size, girth, salary, sexual orientation, everything. It’s all fair game. It’s a sign of proper, deep friendship that a mate can safely say ‘What the fuck are you wearing?’ when you turn up in a brand new shirt you thought you might be mistaken for Brad Pitt in. With a beer gut and bald spot.

Women’s friendships are generally more emotionally mature, but they are also more emotionally tedious. Discussions about problems and disputes with friends, feelings about things, can happily carry on for several days without any intake of breath. Is it possible that women can use their handbags as gills?

MEN AND PROBLEMS

This annoys us men as we are hardwired, when confronted with a problem, to solve it. To a man a problem shared is like being handed a bomb that needs to be defused as quickly as possible. To us it all comes down to which wire to cut. The red one or the blue one?

This is opposed to just talking about it A LOT. It’s man DNA: men are problem solvers. Not always very good solvers, but solvers all the same. Last year my wife told me to get Ruby our eldest daughter’s hair cut but not to spend too much money on it. Quick as a flash I had processed this order and come up with a smart solution: I’d cut it myself.

With no formal training I cut my daughter’s hair. Can you guess what happened next? Even Ruby looked confused as I set about her fringe. With paper scissors. The fringe that my wife had proudly been cultivating for the last six months. Problem solvers. My wife came back home and let’s just say hilarity did not ensue.

MALE PROBLEM SOLVERS EXTRAORDINAIRE

Back to men and their mates. Men in the company of other men are capable of great feats of ingenuity – like Stonehenge, say. Actually, that might not be the best example. Relocating some big rocks. Beer must have been involved.

Men do like to carry interesting objects home from the pub. It’s one of the rare times we enjoy shopping. Or man’s other great motivator:

‘You heard why we’re humping these great big things?’

‘For gullible hippies and dumb American tourists?’

‘Nope, some idiot wants to get in some girl’s knickers.’

Men with other men are also capable of great feats of stupidity.

The Darwin Awards celebrate those who ‘improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it’. They record for us and future generations some darkly funny accidental deaths, mostly featuring men, with other men, and alcohol.

Tony Roberts, 25, lost his right eye having been shot through the skull by a hunting arrow during an initiation into a men’s rafting club, Mountain Men Anonymous (probably known now as Stupid Mountain Men Anonymous) in Grants Pass, Oregon.

What a deadly combination, men with hunting gear and alcohol. (Might make a good episode of Holby City, though). What happened here, I understand, is a good friend of Tony’s tried to shoot a beer can off his head. It would have had to have been a close friend, of course – couldn’t let a complete stranger do something as intimate as shooting at you with large arrows.

Many clubs and societies have some kind of entrance exam, and Mountain Men Anonymous’s test was having someone shoot an arrow at your head while pissed. It’s natural selection: they only want the very finest minds entering. With or without bits of metal protruding from them.

I bet his first words after being released from hospital were, ‘Did I pass? Am I in Mountain Men Anonymous?’

That is nothing compared to what I think is the definitive story of the danger present when two lethal substances come into contact:

Man + Man x Beer = Idea

Let us examine the tale of Sal Hawkins and John Pernicky, two huge Metallica fans. They showed up to where the band was playing in Washington but they had no tickets so sat in the car park drinking beer, thinking the situation over. Suddenly a genius idea occurred. Inspiration. The mother of invention is necessity, they say, but swap necessity for beer and they had something.

A plan was hatched after they noticed that the perimeter fence was only nine foot high and no possible deterrent to two sharp men like themselves. Problem solvers like all men. They then decided to pull their pick-up truck (we could have guessed they drove one of them) over to the fence.

The plan was that John, the heavier of the two, was to hop over and then help his buddy over. Simple. What could possibly go wrong?

Sadly, the fence had a 30-foot drop on the other side. So when John launched himself over like some nubile gymnast from the former Eastern Bloc, he found himself crashing through a big tree, a large branch stopping his descent by snagging his shorts. Dangling from the tree with one arm broken, John saw some bushes beneath him and, being one of nature’s problem solvers, thought he would simply cut away his shorts with his penknife and then drop to the bushes below him. (Must have seen MacGyver or The A Team do something pretty similar.)

Once free of his shorts, John fell down into what he now realised were holly bushes. They scratched him everywhere and, without the protection of his shorts, one branch entered his rectal cavity. It gets worse. The penknife dropped too and when he landed it went three inches into his thigh. Sal saw his buddy in all this pain and sprung into man action. A problem-solving man in action is a sight to see. He threw his fallen comrade a rope, but as John was a big fella, Sal couldn’t pull him too well. Not to worry, try something else, as you never let a mate down. Especially if the mate is partially naked with a branch up his arse. So he attached the rope to the pick-up truck.

This is where it goes really bad.

Sal, in his drunken state, puts the thing in reverse and crashes through the fence, landing flat on top of his mate. Killing him. Sal is thrown from the vehicle and also dies.

The police arrive. Picture the scene that awaits them. Even CSI’s Gil Grissom would have been confused by this one. A pick-up truck with its driver thrown 100 feet away, and then under the truck a semi-naked man, covered in scratches with a holly branch up his rectum, a knife in his leg, and his shorts in a tree.

Here’s to you, John and Sal, two fine minds and men taken from us. Some sort of commemorative statue would be a fitting tribute to these real men of genius. Bronze, I’m thinking, depicting the final sad scene. Branch up bum, truck on top, the whole deal. Men from all over the world could come and pay tribute. Should be placed on the Washington town hall steps. A Man Lourdes. Kids could be taken there to warn them about the dangers of alcohol and, more importantly, being a man.

I feel you also need to know and respect a Polish farmer called Krystof Azninski who in 1995… er… there’s no easy way to put this, cut his own head off.

Guess what? He had been drinking with male friends. Apparently one of the gathered geniuses (or is the plural genii?) casually suggested they strip naked and play some ‘men’s games’.

What was I saying about men together? It’s all fun and games until someone loses a head.

And we wonder why women think we behave like dicks when we are together. Never seen the Sex and the City girls behaving like that? Might watch it if they did.

Back to the naked men and the ‘men’s games’. They start off with a good old round of hitting each other over the head with frozen turnips. No, really. Frozen turnips. Then, as is usually the case, one of the men ups the stakes by getting a chainsaw and CUTTING HIS OWN FOOT OFF.

Now, we weren’t there but you don’t have to wonder at what happened next. Put men together and some form of one-upmanship will occur. It can be the swapping of increasingly tall stories with the final ones being 100 per cent bona fide bullshit; sometimes it’s shots being ordered to ‘get the party started’; sometimes it’s the removal of limbs. Did any of the men say, ‘OK, that’s enough now – we’ve all had a few drinks and smashed frozen turnips over our heads, pretty soon someone’s gonna get hurt’?

No, they didn’t.

Azninski shouted ‘WATCH THIS!’ as he swung the chainsaw at his head, taking it off. His head. Off.

‘It’s funny, when he was young he put on his sister’s underwear. But he died like a man,’ one of those fine men friends said. I think I speak for all of us when I say who would want a more fitting way to be remembered by friends and family?

THE WORLD’S DUMBEST MAN SHOW

I wonder whether there should be a TV show called The World’s Dumbest Man. Think about the enjoyment we still have watching The World’s Strongest Man: ‘Sven the big guy from Iceland is really coping well with the 2CV he’s carrying this year – awesome stuff.’ The World’s Dumbest Man is the next generation. Teams of men from around the world would enter with their mates, as we all know that men are spurred on to even greater feats of stupidity when with their mates. Britain could do well at this. Alcohol would feature in most events.

THE WORLD’S DUMBEST MAN SHOW EVENTS

Chair Sitting. Last man still just sitting in an armchair wins. This could take some time; months even.

Man Tears Challenge. Can any man sit through an episode of Extreme Makeover or Rolf’s Animal Hospital (featuring dogs passing away) or The Champ without crying?

Synchronised Toenail Clipping. (I once saw a man doing this on a train. I was both horrified and impressed.)

Mattress Endurance Challenge. Teams have one mattress to transport as far as they can using a small family car. It can only go on the roof and no ropes are allowed. It’s the classic man driving with one arm on the mattress.

These man games would include Freestyle Bullshitting, where male entrants must talk about anything that has or has not happened to them and then lie about it. As we do. Men are born bullshitters; it is in our DNA. That’s why most car salesmen are men. Pat Butcher included.

Even smart, educated, brave men let their man DNA get the better of them. It would appear that our entire sense of logic and reasoning is drastically altered when in proximity to other men. Man molecules affect and change other man molecules, causing a Man Big Bang.

Imagine you work at the international space station doing important astronaut space work. You wake up in your astronaut bed one day and think:

1 I should go and collect some rock samples so mankind can learn about the life forms up here

2 I should see how far I can hit a golf ball into space with a gold-plated six iron and film it

b) is what Expedition 14 commanders Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin went for. Boys together. In space. Hitting golf balls. Doing important work.

In case you’re wondering about the gravity during the shot, Lopez-Alegria held Tyurin’s feet, which were affixed to a ladder. Tyurin carried three golf balls, but only had time to hit one of them before ground flight controllers instructed the spacewalkers to proceed to their other tasks.

I love that. He held his feet. Don’t tell me we fear intimacy. Here we have two grown men, astronauts who have trained for years, for crying out loud, who agree that one will hold the other’s space boots. Playing Intergalactic Golf. It’s a real shame that the boring ground controllers made them ‘proceed to their other tasks’ rather than hit some more balls. What could possibly be more important than this task? There is, however, a sad end note to this.

The golf ball did not travel in the full retrograde direction, away from the space station, as intended. Instead, Tyurin shanked the ball.

So we go from ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ to ‘Told you you should’ve used the five iron, dickhead.’ Even in space men together will do something stupid. It’s the collision of man molecules. You ask Professor Hawking. I bet the Hawkman, when he gets together with his mates, arses about like any man.

SO HOW DO OUR RELATIONSHIPS COMPARE TO WOMEN’S?

Time after time, research findings conclude that women have deeper and longer-lasting relationships than men. And have more friends. We apparently have superficial friendships that consist of mumbling into cold beers and never saying anything of any emotional worth.

Scared stiff of saying what we really feel, we keep it all in. Then have heart attacks and explode, leaving all our mates going, ‘He never said anything was up.’

So women say we don’t communicate enough. However, it is my serious contention after years of intensive research that men use a far higher dimension to communicate with each other. It’s a previously undiscovered man bandwidth we operate on. The Manwidth. I will be taking my incredible findings of its existence around the world.

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