A man in his castle

 

Subject: A man in his castle.

Do married men resemble characters carrying out  a sort of bit part, slightly off centre, an extra in the unfolding scene around.It's an interesting mental composition. Women generally take centre stage in much of what we call family life, and increasingly theses days, life outside the home, maybe this is the reason we flee to work so early in the morning.

Femininity in a house determines its make up.  A males house is generally temporary and unstructured, it relies on make do and corner cutting, it has sentimentality but without the tears. There's little or no sense of an overview and judgement, it's a get along place where visitors make space amongst last nights projects and drink tea from a cracked cup. Its a make do, not pretentious or mocking, it's what's on the label. It's a man cave, welcoming and warm in its banter and discourse, keen to discuss the latest sporting feature or issue of work perhaps the difficulty of paying bills but not you'll notice in paying the bills but in their recurrent importance in accounting for so much of an income we thought was discretionary. Bills and money are the defining way a man determines his house, not in a need to compete with other households but an understanding of money not as a commodity to spend but a bolster for the future.

For the man his vision of the future is always present, part of his sense of ultimate responsibility, continually balancing  frugality against the wonton spend. Frugality is not a term of failure in his book but one of success, it's his way of pairing down to basics without feeling unbalanced, in fact his frugality is his badge of competence unsullied by anyone's  view of what is required. A man is rich in cast off ambitions, he decries the consumerist, the shopper and the catalog as belonging to a another's view of reality and is happy not to be a slave to fashion. His fashions are drawn from another time, a time when he didn't need fashion to strike a pose. His pose was what he believed in, it was internal rather than external, it was individualistic and not born of the crowd.

And so he sits in later life not bothered if the door bell rings, his encounters are minimal but sufficient, he would rather encounter his own thoughts in a book or a piece of writing than have to listen to the blather and the discord of voices from that other planet