The idiot’s guide to wrestling alligators
MAN UP ! THE REAL MAN’S BOOK OF MANLY KNOWLEDGE by Rod Green (Michael O’Mara £9.99 £8.99)
WHEN I lived in bucolic, landlocked Herefordshire, it would have taken a very persistent shark or alligator to get to me. It would have had to trek across Wales first, with the road signs in Welsh — they’d have stood no chance.
Now I have moved to Rochester, with the muddy Medway lapping at my front door, I’m glad that Man Up tells me exactly what to do when the sharks and alligators pounce. One tip is to ‘go for its eyes, hitting or poking with your fingers’.
I don’t know if they have bears in Rochester (I haven’t been here long), but if a grizzly prowls, I now know the thing to do is ‘wave your arms around so that you seem bigger’.
I pity the bear that has to witness me doing that — it would flee back to the Canadian Rockies quicker than winking. Were I to plan on climbing a tree, I am told to ‘make sure it is strong enough to support someone of your size’. Do Californian Redwoods grow in Kent? Rod Green’s compendium of ‘ manly knowledge’ is aimed at sad blokes who sit in offices and traffic jams and dream of clearing off ‘to create our own adventures and deal with danger’. Not so very long ago, claims the author, ‘our fathers and grandfathers could light fires in the rain, deal with a blown-out tyre, replace a missing button . . .’ Not my father or grandfather. They had the sense to let the women undertake such tasks.
Does Man Up! speak to the inner Boy Scout or the inner idiot? While it is conceivable that during a leisure moment I’ll make my own sundial using a stick, string and pebbles, or even apply ‘a liberal dose of vinegar’ if bitten by a jellyfish in Tenby, do we really need to know how to ram hostile vehicles or deal with angry bulls (the prevailing wisdom is a succinct ‘run away’)?
The author suggests we never leave home without ‘a torch, a button compass, a whistle, a first aid kit and water purification tablets’. What? Even if I’m only going to the Co-op for oven chips? And as much as I enjoyed learning how to open bottle tops with belt buckles, cook without pots and boil water in a plastic bottle, some of the advice on offer would insult the intelligence of a three-year-old.
Heatstroke, for example, ‘is caused by heat’. In order to keep hydrated, ‘water is great’. If you wish to make a raft with logs, ‘first you need your basic material — logs’.
My favourite tip is how to escape from a burning building: ‘Your first priority must be to get out of the burning building’. Really? I was going to hang on until Steve McQueen ran in with his big hosepipe.
On the other hand, coping with nonresponsive car brakes and jammed accelerators are handy skills to acquire.
The chapter about catching rabbits with a snare made me squeamish. ‘When the rabbit comes hopping, its head will go in the noose,’ we are told. You then have to break its neck, skin it and gut it.
I’d be on safer territory tickling trout. ‘Lie face down on the riverbank and reach your tickling hand down into the water.’ All you need is ‘infinite patience, a delicate touch’ — which reminds me of a lot of other things I’m no good at either. But that’s another story.