On Being a Man: Now with 20% less prancing

I look terrified.

I'm not really much of a man's man. The last time I used a shifter spanner it was incorrectly, to fend off an attack from my brother several years ago after I ruined a sculpture he had made by burning bits of plastic GI Joe men together and fusing them together.

We had more guns as children than you could poke some other guns at but I was never very good at shooting. I worried about getting injured. This may be on account of my cousin's injury after he was shot in the stomach with an orange peel my brother had loaded in the gun, just seconds after having been convinced that it would barely hurt.

This was a lie.

My brother was driving an industrial Caterpillar grader by age 11, I was wedging the handlebars of our PeeWee50 between two trees by age 6 and never really getting better at driving, riding or otherwise subduing anything mechanical.

I preferred quieter pursuits, like reading and not having citrus fired into my stomach.

It's hard to say whether I am like this because I am gay or not. But it has precipitated a lifetime of convincing others of my manliness. This explains somewhat the childish vigour with which I approached our excursion to a local game of football yesterday.

Not even a big ticket game of football. It was the kind where people come and sit around a field and wonder why they didn't choose better pastimes and more waterproof underwear. That kind.

It turns out they only sold beer, which I don't drink. But without options, I was forced into purchasing a few brews which I turned into a positive aspect of the afternoon.

I took to prancing across the hill in a scarf yelling at people: "DON'T MIND ME. I'M JUST OFF TO BUY SOME BEER. AT THE FOOTBALL. WITH THE BEER."

Having returned from a beer run with several cans, I momentarily felt what it was truly like to be a man and contemplated grabbing a boob in honour of the occasion.

But don't worry, it quickly passed.

Argh, kill it with fire!

One too many things in this kitchen are flaming...

We never learned to cook. We learned to manipulated fire to the point that we could char steak and simultaneously create a blacker shade of black than scientists, but we never learned to cook.

Life on a cattle station is all about subsistence. If it could be placed within your body without killing you (although even these guidelines were blurred) then it was 'cooked'. We had a station cook, not a chef, whose specialty was cow brains eaten out of a tin with a pocket knife.

That's how subsistence we were: it wasn't even a fucking spoon. In the country, a knife is your knife and it is your fork and it is your spoon. Chopsticks? Get lost, poofter.

Once we had a temporary cook who showed us how to make ice cream (actual farking ice cream) and Dad nearly had him kicked off the station for daring to use science.

Vegetables were never prepared inventively or with pizzazz. Indeed, the word pizzazz was banned. Dad had a habit of cutting things up in chunks roughly the size of our mouths. Nothing smaller. We learned to eat like snakes.

It was not uncommon to be eating a spaghetti bolognese (the only 'exotic' food we were allowed, once a week) and find a quarter of an onion. Not a small onion either, one the size of your fist. If you were served dinner and your fork bumped into a chunk of onion the size of a small exo-planet, you could pretty much envisage the next 15 minutes of agony as you argued whether this technically null and voided your childhood obligation to finish everything on your plate.

Mum was an ace at desserts and baking, where we were quite spoiled, but anything else was a utilitarian display of beige. We'd kill one cow a month and work our way as a family through the entire carcass of frozen meat, like the world's worst version of a National Lampoon's adventure movie.

At the end of the month you'd invariably be picking through offal and the last bits of the beast in the cold room wondering whether it might be served best after being thrust into a kiln and glazed for several days.

Suffice to say, my childhood was never infused with a love of food. Nor an appreciation of how truly wonderful it can be. I was 18 and living out of home when I first had Indian. I still remember how utterly alien it was to me at the time. And even then I was only having butter chicken.

I still can't use chopsticks. I've tried but I suspect they are like a second language. If you can't wield them by puberty, you'll forever be conjugating the wrong verbs and fumbling your chicken.

This is why I cannot cook, though I am learning slowly.

I used to buy cookbooks for beginners and they'd include advice like 'boil four eggs'. Awesome. How?

Do I stare at them until they spontaneously combust? Put them in a frying pan?

But now I have Twitter, for all my inane questions. Questions like:

Why is my chicken sizzling?

What does jus actually mean?

WHY IS MY EVERYTHING ON FIRE?

Oh to have the genetic predisposition to know what the fuck I am doing in the kitchen.