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Emasculinity

On the return train there is no dining car layout, instead we have plastic boxes with pre-packed sachets of washed and cut fresh apple, all the way from France, biscuits in wrappers, a bread roll with a smear of filling, and as many drinks as we like. Same company, different style of catering. Why? There is a buffet car though, for the gourmets among us.

The carriage is full of workers, beavering away on their laptops or shouting their importance into mobile phones. I wish they’d shut up. I don’t care who they are or what they said to so-and-so in the meeting. I pity the poor fools that think this qualifies as a life.

A very attractive, and smartly dressed Scotswoman was very loud on her phone on the way up here, on her way to Glasgow after a day of such meetings. I was sitting about ten seats away but, such was her annoyance, her conversation was inescapable.

Not really a conversation, but a diatribe, directed at her son, aged 19, who had a friend that had annoyed her very much by ‘living in our house’ for weeks apparently and had enraged her by calling on her hapless son the preceding evening, which prevented him from studying.

She rants at him for not getting himself a suit. Eventually she makes several other calls, to her husband (where has he been all the while?) and to various shops in Glasgow, before calling their son back with more invective to say he must meet her at the station at 7.00 that night and she will go with him and buy his suit at the Glasgow Fort because everywhere else is closed.

She makes a further phone call to a travel company to pay for this young man’s holiday which he has failed to do.

She calls her son back repeatedly to rail against him for not doing these things himself.

Why would he, when she is going to sort it out for him?

Infantilized, emasculated. By what I wonder.

Fifty years ago this boy, at 19, would have gone off to war, a fighting man, or he may have been apprenticed and working, or a husband or father. What is such a modern young man’s purpose when even the task of consuming is far too onerous? Leave it all to mother.
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