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the feeling you get from most of what’s on television: ‘This is okay – I might keep watching for a bit but I’ll happily watch something else if it comes along or indeed turn away when the microwave pings.’ TV assaults us with wave after wave of acceptable, mildly diverting mediocrity. Yet, to see it reviewed or hear it discussed by those that make it, you’d think it was a weird alternating barrage of unprecedented brilliance and inexcusable garbage. That’s just not how it seems to me – maybe I need to adjust my set.

So I feel slightly ashamed to neither despise nor adore all these new machines that are changing the world. My plodding, not particularly adept, reluctant but not resistant attempts to vaguely and half-heartedly sort of get to grips with some of these things is disappointing for people. I get it with cricket as well. I quite like watching cricket, as a result of which people assume that I’m a huge cricket fan. ‘I know you’re obsessed with cricket,’ people say, as if to be able to stand cricket at all must mean that I can’t get enough of it. But I just quite like it. I don’t want to be painted a fanatic, or real fanatics will think I’m a fraud. Or a moron who, despite apparently being obsessed with the sport, can’t remember who last year’s county champions were. By saying I like to go to the cricket, it feels like I’ve misrepresented myself as someone who can think of nothing else. ‘Not everything is like Marmite!’ I want to scream. ‘Including, I suspect, Marmite!’ Never has a product more successfully concealed the truth of its mediocrity merely by conceding the fact that some people find it disgusting.

Maybe men are supposed to have fanatical hobbies – that seems to be a thing. ‘Men are from Mars, they like to go in their cave and make model ships or play fantasy war games or tinker with vintage cars.’ That’s the current off-the-shelf analysis. My lack of a real hobby or obsession on which to lavish all my spare time is probably a sign of a want of masculinity, a lack of testosterone.

Certainly, if you read men’s magazines, it’s made very clear that men are supposed to be massively into watches and gadgets and yachts and possibly golf clubs. It’s odd that the magazines push traditional masculine traits so hard – you’d think that would be counter-productive to their aims. One thing I’d have thought was definitely part of an old-school golf-watches-guns-and-cars view of men is that they shouldn’t buy magazines. Magazines, under that system, are surely for women. As are novels. Men should read the Financial Times or pornography. Of course many men’s magazines are fairly close to pornography but are trying to present themselves as something else. Or maybe it’s the other way round? Maybe it’s the pornographical element that makes men feel it’s okay for them to buy a magazine. The veneer of tits allows them to indulge their secret effeminate interests in jewellery and scent.

It annoys me to be living in an era where one of the few traditional male attributes that I naturally possess – an aversion to grooming, pampering and perfume – is no longer valued. Indeed, for transparent marketing reasons, it’s positively discouraged. My attitude that hair should be neatly cut, washed in shampoo but not conditioned or gunked up with ‘product’ is almost frowned upon now, as if displaying a want of personal hygiene. Answering the question ‘How would you like to smell?’ by saying ‘I’d rather I didn’t’ is also no longer acceptable. It’s not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too – it’s seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations – millennia – to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

I only feel like this because I have a slightly perverse approach to my own appearance. I’m desperate never to be accused of vanity – which is a vanity in itself. I hate the thought that anyone could point to any aspect of my appearance and say, ‘You think