Once you hit a certain age, say 40, it feels like a big deal because A) everyone tells you that it’s a big deal, and B) you probably remember your dad turning 40 and thinking what a real man he was. Just pure guy, 100 per cent bloke. The patriarch, the provider, the professional. He was probably good at football (or some other sport), confident, authoritative, an alpha male – everything a man supposedly should be. He was 40, and he encapsulated ‘dadness’.

Now you’re 40, maybe approaching it, maybe giving it the stare in the rear-view mirror. Maybe you’re a dad, too. Only what you see staring back at you each morning is something less certain, less overtly masculine, less blokeish. Sure, you’re a patriarch, but only in the biological sense; and you provide for your family, but so does your other half. This immediately presents two realisations: the first being that our expectations of masculinity might have shifted somewhat in the last twenty-something years, and also that your dad was probably blagging it anyway. Turns out he’s shy and kind, and he works hard, but a macho man, he is not.

Whatever overtly masculine vibes you saw him to be giving off had been fed to you. Fed by various suppositions that were nurtured in your head, passed down through the generations, and then passed through a basic set of childish filters. Because you saw him only in ‘dad’ terms, all you saw were the traits that dads were supposed to have. But the more you talk and reminisce now, the more he likely alludes to his uncertainty and insecurity as a young father. Of being a man.

The lesson here being that ‘masculinity’ in its most draconian sense isn’t something that’s easy (or even possible) to live up to. It’s long been absurdly defined as something stoical, successful, strong. Few of these traits honestly point towards the reality of being a man. Even the archetypes of brave soldiers coming home from battle belie a hidden truth of generations surely crippled by post-traumatic stress, numbed by war.