Christian O’Connell - The Men Commandments

Technology has moved at an incredible pace. Televisions have got better and bigger and bigger again. Soon your entire living room wall will just be a TV, and you will still be mumbling, ‘Should have got a bigger one.’

But not all technological advances have been to the benefit of men. Witness our enslavement by the mobile phone. Fifteen years ago, we could go where we wanted and no one would bother us. We could head off down the pub for a few misspent hours and no one would ever know. Now we can be tracked down and worse, contacted, EVERYWHERE. Phones are evil. Just look at poor Jack Bauer. If he threw the damn phone away, he could chill out for a day.

We have made some incredible advancements but in the last few years our evolution has reversed at times. I’m not just talking about Big Brother contestants. I blame much of this on two things. One: man bags. It was pleasing to see in The Bourne Ultimatum that the Guardian journalist sporting a man bag was assassinated very early in the movie. Two: low-slung denim. You know what I’m talking about – the fools that wear jeans hanging around their knees, with no belt. If you’re 14, fine. Not if you’re a man. Martin Freeman, best known as Tim from The Office and now a movie star, was on my radio show and made a very fair point on this man wrong. ‘Is that the Dunkirk spirit? I don’t think so. We couldn’t have won the war in baggy denim.’

So we come to the year 2008 in my totally unreliable history of men and the news that men all over the world are talking about… a man is pregnant. That’s right. One of us is up the duff. A woman has had something called ‘gender realignment’ surgery, which I think is what Andrew Lloyd Webber has had on his face. Maybe it’s my TV but I’m sure that’s a bollock where his head should normally be.

KEY MOMENTS IN MAN HISTORY

Monkeys or mice?

Choose monkey

Find fire. Love it

Egyptians invent booze. Cheers

Greeks give men sport

Caesar gets a comb-over

Two men outdo each other for a woman. With spuds and fags

1769: Car invented. Let’s ignore the fact it came from France

A short-arse Frenchie called Napoleon turns down a shag

1925: TV. Pass the remote, please

1945: Germany defeated by port-swigging cigar-chomping Brit

1950s: Rock and roll

1951: Steven Seagal born

1953: A man called Norm invents WD-40

1968: Columbo aired for first time

1972: The Godfather is released

1975: Charlize Theron is born

1977: Pot Noodles

2001: Sky Plus arrives

IV

Much has been devoted to our relationships with women, which we will come to in good time. But men’s relationships with other men, their buddies, mates and old muckers, are rarely discussed. They are full of unspoken weird rituals, rules and codes. And there are serious repercussions for breaching them.

It’s a constant mystery to women what we actually talk about when we get together with our mates. ‘Not much’ is usually the reply. I sometimes think they feel we are planning a secret man uprising, an escape committee like Steve McQueen and Dickie in The Great Escape . The very idea of a man uprising is stupid. There’s far too much organising and effort involved for a start. Plus it can’t be this Tuesday as the missus has her yoga class and I’m looking after the kids. How’s next Monday?

Women think we bond with each other over endless boring sports chats, booze and bottom coughs. What they don’t know is that, like them, we also chat about our other halves. Just not with the same level of intimacy or detail. What they also don’t realise is that men operate under a series of complex rules and codes. We all know they exist, the unwritten rules, and I have recorded them here for the first time in history.

As we get into relationships and start families, actually getting to see your mates gets harder and harder. Most women immediately fear, distrust and even hate your mates.

They edge them out and restrict your visiting times, or even worse, come with you when you go out with them. She might as well hold your hand or put your balls in her handbag. Your man card *has been revoked.

Women often utter the phrase, ‘That’s not in the diary,’ when you remind her tomorrow is the night you’re hooking up with some old chums. A date you got proper clearance on and did all the relevant paperwork for a while ago. This date probably required days of groundwork (interesting how men often use building phrases to describe relationships – ‘groundwork’, ‘shaky foundations’, ‘preparation’). Perhaps you tidied some of your mess up, said her hair looks nice or removed some of the old takeaway cartons from the fridge.

The simple truth is you will never see the ‘diary’ in question as it doesn’t exist. If it did it would just read: YOU WILL NEVER SEE YOUR FRIENDS AGAIN AS THEY ARE ARSEHOLES AND I HATE THEM.

Maybe women are scared of the bond we have with other men, or scared that whenever we see them we drink too much and are sick over ourselves and on occasion over them. ‘You behave differently,’ they often say – and they’re right. Our mental age is somewhat lowered in the company of other men.

I have also noticed women really don’t like that way we whisper among ourselves and then laugh really loudly. If you’re ever asked what you were laughing at, always lie. Don’t tell them the truth. No matter what they threaten you with.

Last Christmas my refusal to rat out myself and my brother-in-law about what we found so funny got me the stink eye (see Men and Women) for a few hours but it’s a rap you have to take. No one likes a snitch. It’s like Steve McQueen as ‘The Cooler King’ in The Great Escape – you do your time. However, I wasn’t allowed any ball games to pass the time.

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.

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’.