Dialogue: Get in touch with my feelings? Yeeeeeeech!

God knows what I was doing there, and so do I. I know exactly what I was doing there. I was being bored, bored till my skull bubbled. Across the detritus of a dinner table, the crumpled napery, the rinds of cheeses, the hardening shards of bread and the heel-ends of wine, I had tossed some idle and perhaps mildly disparaging remark about new-age sensitivities and suddenly I found myself being addressed by an unacceptable man.

His clothes were unacceptable, his voice was unacceptable and his beard was ... well ... small nations have gone to war over less.

I seemed, inadvertently, to have broached the man's pet subject. It was not a subject which he discussed; it was a topic on which he lectured. And now he was lecturing me.

His subject was emotion and, in particular, the supremacy of emotion in our frail existences. Emotion is all, he said - or at least he would have said if he had ever acquired the knack of using words of fewer than four syllables - and we chaps had better get the hang of it. We've been bottling up our feelings for far too long and are the shallower and the worse for that bottling.

There was so much to say to this nonsense that I merely gawped. Not only was I swamped with an mixture of disbelief and nausea, but I also suspected that if at any moment an emotion had wandered into my lecturer's life, he would have shooed it away like a vagrant dog which had cocked its leg over his azaleas, and then retired to his unthinkable study with another cup of instant coffee and a plate of theory.

But the subtext of his lecture told the opposite story. Here before me, he implied, with only a stained and littered tablecloth between us, sat a man who had come to grips with his emotional self, a man who hugged and wept and owned a wardrobeful of the appropriate jerseys, each with a nice little niche on the sleeve for him to wear his heart on. Here was the developed male, the evolutionary masterpiece ready for all the complexities of the 21st century.

Rather than risk pushing boredom to the point where I would need to ring for an ambulance, I said nothing, but then he spoke the phrase that acts on me like electrotherapy. We men need, he said, to get in touch with our feelings.

Well, I'm sorry. I don't know who coined this absurd phrase nor do I know why it has gained such currency, but I'm not having it. You see, I've had a feeling or two over the years and I've never had the least difficulty getting in touch with them.

In general things have been the other way round - feelings have got in touch with me with unassuageable urgency.

What is all this stuff about the supposed emotional nullity of men? Did this man never go through adolescence? Did he never yield to the tsunami of love?

Did he never moan and toss and pitch on the high seas of feeling or wander alone on the windy hills of grief reciting the deathless lyrics of awful poetry and knowing that no one had ever felt as he? And if he did, does he still say that men need to get in touch with their feelings?

And has he never felt his heart tugged by a work of literature? Has he not gulped for Tess or wept for the death of Michael Henchard who couldn't spell? Has he not eaten the white raspberries of Brideshead or trodden with Laurie Lee the sharp white roads of Spain? And if he has, does he still say that men need to get in touch with their feelings?

What does this man and so many like him mean? What does he seek? Does he wish us to blub our way around the world, our lower lips perpetually trembling?

Does he believe that all that is felt is equally worthy and, furthermore, that all that is felt should be said? And does he discount all the glittering wonder that springs from emotion kept in harness? Has he no time for the sharp and bitter edge of comedy? Or is he just trying to please women?

So many questions, all of them rhetorical and none of them, I'm proud to say, given voice. I reined them in. I bottled them up. I did what I am not supposed to do.

And when shortly afterwards I thanked my host and took my leave, I carried them away with me into the welcome cool of the night and when I felt that I was almost out of earshot, I screamed the lot of them to the silent sky in a single protracted note.

And then I laughed. And then I felt good. And then I went home.