It was a sudden death that brought my old friends together, and in retrospect maybe that unlocked something. We hadn’t seen each other for years but the morning after the wake, it all came tumbling out over breakfast: worries about parents getting older, teenage kids, toxic bosses, career frustrations. Doubts were confessed, advice sought. It’s the stuff of female friendship down the ages, but the reason it stuck in my mind is that everyone round the table bar me was a man, and these definitely weren’t the conversations we used to have in the pub after work back in our 20s.
In both private and public life, so much of men’s once suppressed interior lives now seems to be rising to the surface. Think of the broadcaster Richard Coles’s beautiful memoir on grief, or the comedian Rhod Gilbert’s TV documentary on coming to terms with infertility, or David Baddiel’s exploration of caring for his father, who had dementia; of politicians from Labour’s Sadiq Khan to the uber-Brexiter Steve Baker talking candidly about struggling with their mental health, or of Prince Harry seemingly trying to build an entire new career out of raking through his dysfunctional childhood.
