Flowers and ting

Flowers, man.

Don’t get ‘em. Likely never will.

Terrifying.

The other day I was in Tesco buying flowers for my good lady wife who was feeling poorly at the time. I don’t often buy flowers. Mostly because I never know what ‘kind’ to get.* Do you get the one that look like your stereotypical flowers? Do you get the weird looking ones that sort of resemble broccoli? A combination of both? And then after all that you’ve still got the colour to worry about.

It’s a wonder I don’t just collapse into a gibbering heap in front of the people queuing for fegs and lottery tickets.

[* is ‘kind’ even the right way to describe flowers? Should I have used ‘type’ or ‘genus?’ Should I use their correct Latin name?]

And Tesco, or any supermarket, is probably the easiest place to buy them too. If you go into an actual florists, you don’t just pick out whatever flowers you think look nicest, and hope for the best. They ask you what kind of flowers you’d like. At that point I feel like I’m on Who Wants to be a Millionaire staring in befuddlement at the final question, on the verge of tears, while Chris Tarrant chuckles amiably at my ineptitude.

“Uh…can I have the…er, the…um…well, I think she likes…erm”

*collapses in front of people queuing for fegs and lottery tickets, but not before noting it odd that a florist sells such things*

Just out of shot; me, crying on the floor.

In the end I just point to something that looks vaguely flowery and pretty, in much the same way as I do when ordering food abroad, in the hope that the woman behind the counter doesn’t chastise me for picking some hideous flower that’ll upset my wife so much that she’ll leave me and shack up with some flower aficionado, with better hair. Because like the florists, the barbers is another place where I’m generally befuddled as to what to ask for so there’s no doubt many many people out there with better hair than me.

But in general, flowers annoy me. I can appreciate a flower as well as anyone else, and when they’re not caused my hay fever afflicted sinuses to sneeze over everything in sight, I can agree that they’re pretty and are nice to look sitting on the windowsill in my front room. But more often than not it’s assumed that if you, a man, are buying flowers you’ve either done something wrong or looking to get something.

The woman in Tesco when I got to the counter to pay straight up asked me ‘So what did you do then?’ Aside from being utterly presumptuous of her - I hadn’t done anything wrong – it makes it seem that women are such petty creatures that one bunch of flowers is a cure-all method for any indiscretions you, the horrible horrible man, have carried out. Unless of course, it works. Womenfolk, are you so blinded by flowers’ colourful olfactory powers that it supersedes any transgressions the man in your life has committed? I’d like to hope not.  

"They're lovely. I totally forgive you for sleeping with my sister."

And then you have the Valentines Day aspect of it, which in my mind is statistically the least romantic time to give your partner flowers. I would reckon at least 95% of men get their significant other some form of flowers on February 14^th which hardly makes the recipient feel special, does it? ‘Aw, you relented to cultural norms and did the same thing as millions of other men around the world have also done. How romantic and thoughtful of you, and not at all a near mandatory demand forced upon you by years of indoctrination that today is the most romantic day of the year.’ Buy your partner flowers on a Tuesday in October, completely out of the blue. I don’t pretend to know the anything about the workings of the female mind, but I can pretty much guarantee you it’ll be more special to her than buying her flowers on a pre-determined ‘romantic’ day.

If she likes flowers, that is. If she doesn’t then don’t buy her any, you idiot.

The shelf life of flowers bothers me too. If I receive something as a gift, I fully expect it to last for a good while. I have things in my house that I got for my 18^th birthday (I’m 28 now) that I still use and are still in good nick. Flowers, if you’re lucky, last a week. A week! I’ve got milk in my fridge that lasts longer than that! And considering the amount of money that you can spend on a bouquet of flowers, I don’t feel that’s a very solid investment. Some bunches of flowers even have the audacity to state that they ‘Will Last for 4 Days.’ Four days. Four poxy days. Imagine if you were given a DVD or a game and it said ‘Will Only Work for the Next Four Days.’ You’d be livid. If I’m spending that amount of money on something I either better be able to keep it or eat it. Preferably both.

If I had my way, I’d have all men give their partners acorns. It’s kind of a flower. Trees are pretty. And it’ll last for years.

Now that’s a solid investment.

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In conclusion, I think flowers are a pretty stupid gift. But I’m a massive hypocrite because I bought Jenny some the other day, and they made her smile.

So maybe they do have some merit.

But what do I know? 

[EDIT: I haven't sworn in this blog, surprisingly, so here's a picture.]

Men: What the Hell Happened?

Haven’t blogged in a while, (Belfast Times and Following The Nerd have been taking up most of my writing time; in a good way I might add) but recently I’ve noticed something that I wanted, nay NEEDED, to write down my thoughts on. 

Namely men and how we’ve become less manly over the years. Now naturally I’m not talking about myself here. I’m as manly as they come; in my weedy, computer game playing, comic book reading, unable to grow a decent beard kind of way (form an orderly queue, ladies) but rather other men that taking beautifying themselves to an extreme degree. You see recently, I was privy to a conversation involving the best type of eyewear to protect one’s eyes whilst using a sun bed; whether little paper coverings or goggles were the way to go. There are considerable problems with both apparently, but with the paper things coming off best because while they don’t provide adequate protection they also don’t cause unseemly white lines around the eye area that the goggles quite clearly do. Clearly eyesight is an acceptable sacrifice for a perfect tan.

Now this conversation was between two members of my own sex, and while I’m not casting aspersions on the sexuality of either, it does strike me as odd because these two are predominantly, due to other conversations witnessed and partaken in, very much of the alpha male variety (“grrr, birdz, tits and beer”). Yet here they are, one proudly proclaiming that he partakes in a regular tanning session and extolling the virtues of same to the other in a way, that I hope isn’t too presumptuous, more commonly associated with gay men. It got me thinking…is this normal? Is this what men, who I might add are only a few years younger than me, do now? 

I'm not even the dude on the right. And he's the one that probably gets made fun of by the others.

Granted both are, as far as I’m aware, single, and maybe times have moved on since I was a-curtin’ so perhaps this sort of self beautification is common place amongst the 18-24 single male. But God, I hope not. When I was younger, the only regime I had was a morning shower, some hair gel and a shave every so often (to be honest, it’s not much different now at the ripe old age of 28); I didn’t go and get tanned, I didn’t  wax my chest, I didn’t moisturise. To this day my wife has to forcibly pin me down to pluck the hairs from my head when my bushy eyebrows (plural) start threatening to become a full on monobrow (singular), and it usually requires bribery of some sort on her part.

And then there’s the gym of it all. The tanning seems to come as a direct result of going to the gym to get ‘ripped’ or ‘shredded’ and other such awful words for turning yourself into a vein-y, pill popping, shrivelled testicle owning ponce. [Have you ever seen the programme Geordie Shore? Don’t, it’s awful. Unfortunately I have and anyone that aspires to look the same as one of the muscle-bound, borderline retarded twats on that show is a complete bell-end.] And also, don’t tell me about your gym sessions, either directly or when I’m in earshot. You cannot even begin to believe the amount of fucks I don’t give. 

No caption necessary. But here's one anyway.

So does the fact that I do none of these things mean that I wouldn’t get a girlfriend today? I really hope not. I’m not one to pretend to know the female mind in any way, but surely that’s not what women want. Otherwise I’d be fucked, to put it mildly. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I just throw any old shite on me. I take a little pride in my appearance but if I’m going for a night out my first thought isn’t ‘Shit, I better get a couple of minutes on the sunbed.’

Ladies, you can fantasise all you want about your Channing Tatum’s and your Ryan Gosling’s (incidentally, two actors I don’t get the attractive appeal of. I mean, they’re no Jeffery Dean Morgan) but don’t expect me to bust my ass to look like that. However the real problem is that I don’t think the ladies are the ones who expect their men to look this way anyway. It’s the men themselves that think that the womenfolk want them to look ‘shredded’ (even typing that word pains me) that are the problem. 

Sexy motherfucker, right there.

But aside from the tanning fiasco the other thing that really prompted me to write this blog was when I was at the barbers this weekend, a mother came in with her son. He can’t have been more than 3 years old. As the little kid sat in the barbers chair next to mine his mum came up beside him and made all sorts of requests to the barber about what she wanted done to the boy’s hair. It seemed awfully complex and sounded like it required a lot of work. She used the word feathered. FEATHERED?!?!?!? Feathered hair. FOR A THREE YEAR OLD!!! I can’t be sure but I’m fairly certain that when my parents took me to get my hair cut when I was three, they sat me down in the chair, pointed at my head and yelled “SHORT. MAKE HAIR SHORTER” at the barber. Ok, this might not actually have happened, but they certainly didn’t request that my hair be layered. You’re three. You’re not going to give two shits what your hair looks like.

So is this obsession with male grooming and beautification happening at a younger and younger age? Am I amongst an ever decreasing amount of men who couldn’t care less about their appearance, at least not to the extent that those not that much younger than me do? Are parents instilling this in their children so that eventually they’ll grow up to be preening pretty boys, with shaved chests and perfect abs and highlights in their hair?

I mean, ‘feathered.’

For fucks sake. 

Real men should even know what 'feathered' means.