I was thinking; if my best mate were to put his hand to his face and rip off what I was led to believe was human skin, thereby revealing himself as a cyborg, should I be afraid?

Well, should I? If so, why is that?

After all if the guy has given me, say, ten years of friendship, why would fear suddenly enter the equation?

Should I be intimidated because I can now see his moving bits? (And if he were to show me his, am I obliged to show him mine?)

Okay, so on one level – thinking he was a homo sapien – I’ve been bonding with him under a misapprehension, but is that enough justification for the relationship to end?

If so, is it because a basic element of being human – that of having the power to trust – has been exposed as false?

I ask, because doing my day job involves working with young teenagers, and the amount of technology that now fills their time suggests to me that a few of them may be cyborgs. What kind of disturbs me is that I can’t tell who are the humans. I find myself becoming suspicious that I may be lecturing to a mixed group. Those who yawn a lot during the morning are obviously humans who were in front of a screen until the early hours. On the other hand, Lance and Jerome are, I suspect, unnaturally brighter than they should be for fourteen year-olds, never yawning and having a challenging look whenever I communicate directly with either of them.

So if they are part of the cyborgian fraternity, well, should I worry?

For some months, I’ve been trying to work out – privately – what properties make us human, like, for example, trust. I only have a few mates, not because I am a miserable bastard (which I’m not) but because I find that inevitably, I only have a limited time to share with others. I’ve learned from experience that if a thing has life, it will atrophy if it isn’t fed, so I make an

effort to keep my one-to-one friendships well-watered.

Shooting the shit regularly with each of them helps to build the trust that I reckon is a fundamental element of bonding between guys.

There’s a section in the What Men Do Guide about Alexander the Great and the way he sustained close relationships with the guys with whom he was tight. Remember, we’re talking about a time when entrapment and betrayal were the ultimate sins (though according to today’s leading psychologists they still are what we guys fear most.),

So, is my current fear of getting close to a cyborg a sad reflection of my lack of balls? Should I accept that I’m fast becoming like one of the Neanderthals who, 30,000 years ago, couldn’t keep up with the competition of the homo sapiens and eventually died out?

Currently, as a homo sapien, perhaps I should start to pal up with the homo cyborgs and get used to grinding my molars on a diet of megabyte salad.

Three weeks ago we posted a blog entitled ‘Life’s A Buffet’, in which we bemoaned the ‘speed’ of Life today and its resultant demands on our time, our energy and the ramifications on our thought processes.

Since we produced that blog I’ve been thinking about how reflective it was of our lopsided existence –

in that we have fallen into the trap of placing excessive emphasis on ‘Thinking Man’ at the expense of ‘Feeling Man’ and ‘Sensing Man’.

Is this cutting-off of Feeling and Sensing the inevitable result of the power of the bureaucrat and his need to reduce life to quantity so that, unlike quality, it can be objectively measured and assessed?

It makes me wonder how much of the pain that is so common in families – the taken-for-granted/under-appreciated wife; the emotionally neglected children; the ‘forgotten’ parents – are now unhappy because the father figure at the centre of these relationships no longer includes Feelings and Sensing within his system of human values.

And if you were to make a list of the qualities that you deemed made you human, would you place ‘Feeling’ above ‘Thinking’?

If this was considered relative to our communication with others then the heart, as the centre of ‘Feeling Man’, reaches a deeper level of human understanding than the surface level of the brain.

Compare, for example, the empathy we have with those in distress or who are grieving because they have lost a loved one. Our power to display compassion and empathise deeply with the

other guy is the result of recognising his Feelings from an awareness of our own. If we lack access to these Feelings there is no way we can reach the depth necessary to provide him with comfort and understanding.

Instead, we have only the glib surface provided by the brain which, through its intelligent knowledge of our culture, ‘knows’ what to say and how to behave. But this is little more than sentimental good manners akin to the calculated bonhomie we share with the guy with whom we play golf – the ‘friendship’ of the intellect; the brain-to-brain communication which allows us to play chess with a robot.

This is not to decry the powers of the brain but simply to question if the aforementioned ‘speed’ within which we now live has created a distortion of human values.

Have we succumbed to the philosophy promulgated by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) with his ‘Cognito, ergo sum’ – ‘I think, therefore I am’ – which clearly places the brain at the centre of our existence?

A serious study of the history of our long maturing process is

surely a better guide to the formation of our human values.

The Sensing with which we first made contact as human beings occurred in the trees when we risked our first experience of co-operation.

Recognising that co-operation actually achieved its objectives, the process led on to the emergence of Sensing Man and, much much later, to Mr Intellectual and his practical knowledge. We became as we are – fully fledged homo sapiens.

But where are we going now?

In an age in which we must have everything instantly, I’m thankful to work in an Industry in which Craft is still highly valued.

Graphic Designers and Art Directors seem to fiddle endlessly, obsessed with the detail. They stew over

tiny gaps between letters (they even have a word for these gaps), the less tiny gaps between words (they have a different name for these types of gaps), and will spill their (or your) blood before diminishing their favourite gap of all, ‘white space’.

Then there are Copywriters. There’s something a bit ‘Orwell 1984’ about them. They try to reduce every possible piece of communication to its absolute minimum and simplest. It’s not quite got to “Doubleplus Good” but it can’t be long now. A copywriter will spend days, if not weeks, fiddling and prodding and pruning to see if they can say a two word phrase in one word. It’s word whittling.

An Ad agency full of bearded chaps in skinny jeans might not seem like the ideal foundation for a post about manly crafting, but it is. So an Ad agency isn’t the Carpenter’s workshop, the Blacksmith’s forge or Stone Mason’s lathe, but it shares the requisite qualities to be grouped with these super masculine crafts.

And while we’re at it, let’s throw in the Samurai too. Early on in their career(?) they would choose a discipline, archery, hand to hand combat, sword, horsemanship and more, then they would spend the rest of their life in the pursuit of perfection in that discipline. Crafty bunch.

To craft almost seems unreasonable now. “It’ll do” passes. Furniture is expected to fall to pieces sooner or later. Typos are found in every newspaper (and a lot of ads… and the odd one on this blog). Craft is the opposite of this culture. Time is irrelevant to an extent, because the aim isn’t to produce as much of something in as little time as possible, it’s to make something to the standard you are striving toward… and hell, if you don’t quite reach it this time, you’ll be that little bit better for the next attempt.

Craft is caring and passion and sweat. It’s standards. It’s setting an example. And that’s What Men Do.

A final note from the one and only Snoop Lion (neé Dogg)

“If it’s flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s, be the best hamburger flipper in the world. Whatever it is you do you have to master your craft.”

This week’s Guest Blog comes after a shaving related revelation by our good friend, Philip Ralph.

I suppose I must have been 12 or 13 and I guess he must have shown me how to do it but none of this is based on any actual recollection or memory. I’m just guessing that, at some point, my dad must have done what all dad’s are supposed to do…

He must have taught me how to shave.

I’ve never been a guy with a ‘five o’clock shadow’. More like a ‘midnight the following day if I’ve

eaten a lot of spinach shadow’ kind of guy. But still, like every other man, at a certain age, the dark shadows on my face ceased to be mud and actually were that crappy downy hair that guys get before they start shaving. And after thinking it was cool for five minutes – (a mistake, guys, let me assure you of that – it isn’t cool. It looks crap, end of story) – I realised pretty fast that I was *never* going to look good with a beard and so began to dip my toes into the adult world of shaving.

My dad has always been an electric razor kind of guy. Maybe it’s because he was born during the war and saw this new technology as a boon when it arrived. No more soaping and brushing, scraping and hacking. Just plug it in, charge it up and BUZZZZZZZZZZ … Beard gone! But I never felt that way. Right from the start, electric razors seemed to me to be about as much use as chocolate teapots. I rubbed it round my face for five minutes and came away feeling vaguely dirty. So, for me, it was always going to be wet shaving. And this is where the fun really starts. And also my story.

The common way of going about it nowadays is you buy some form of disposable razor system – Mach-this, or Zoom-that – you slather your face with foam from a can and scrape away with your – how many blades?!?! – razor until your face is smoothish and then you dab something on it and Bob’s your uncle. And that’s how I shaved for years – squirting, scraping, dabbing. But something about it wasn’t right… All those razors, used a few times and then chucked away; a process of hair removal that never required me to do anything other than move my hand up and down. It was boring. It was soulless. It was wasteful.

I know you’re probably thinking what difference do a few little razors make in the grand scheme of things? It’s not like throwing away a car, is it? But – in the course of a lifetime of shaving and throwing – it probably is. And I don’t want to contribute to landfill. Not till I’m dead.

So, I got this idea. I knew that – somewhere in the mists of time, before disposables – men used to do it differently. I’d seen it on TV or in movies. They used to shave with cutthroat razors – otherwise known as ‘straight’ razors. A single blade, agonisingly sharp, without any guard or safety features. And you shave with it by, literally, dragging it across your face. (For the record, at this point, if you saw Naomi Harris’s Moneypenny shaving Daniel Craig’s Bond with a cutthroat in Skyfall and thought it looked cool, you were right. If you thought she wouldn’t have left him a bleeding mess, you were wrong. Dreadful technique…) I knew this was how men used to shave but I didn’t know if you still could. I turned to the internet to find out…

Some weeks later I was walking into a shop on London’s Jermyn Street called Taylor’s of Old Bond Street. Despite this odd confusion of name and place, everything else about the shop is a paradise for men. Its sole purpose is ‘male grooming’ and not the kind that is illegal… Inside, amidst a wonderland of brushes, sprays, creams and unguents, a fantastic shop assistant, dressed to the nines in tails and dress shirt, took me through the process of buying my first straight razor and all the accoutrements I would need to use it. And then he showed me how…

The blade must be stropped – run up and down a strip of leather – to hone the already sharp cutting edge to infinitesimal thinness; the face must be washed and prepared with shaving oil; the soap must be lathered using a traditional badger hair brush before being applied to the wet beard; and then the blade must be carefully – oh, SO VERY, VERY CAREFULLY – run against the grain of the beard, shaving back to the skin; before finally after shave cream is applied and a block of moistened alum dabbed on to cauterise any major snicks or bleeds. As I took my many purchases to the till where George, a man as old as the shop itself, rang them up for me, I felt as if I were joining an ancient lineage of male behaviour. George saw my trepidation and excitement and winked at me – “Best shave you’ll ever have, son…”

Later, at a friend’s flat – when everyone else was out

so as to avoid spectators – I prepared myself for my first ‘real’ shave. Half an hour later, dazed and bloody, I looked at myself in the mirror – and for the first time, perhaps in my whole adult life, I felt like a man.

Why? Because shaving like this is all about responsibility, danger and time. It’s about staying present and aware for every second because the tiniest moment of distraction can lead to a cut, or worse, a serious wound. You can’t stand there, razor in one hand, dick in the other, listening to the radio, checking Facebook and scratching your arse. You have to focus entirely on the task at hand. And you have to take your time. And you have to care for the blade – sharpening, honing, oiling. I asked the guy in the shop how long it would last and he looked at me with an amused smile at my naivety: “This razor, sir, will last you a lifetime…”

Imagine, just for a second, that instead of handing me a plug in electric monstrosity when I was 13, my dad had taken me to that shop and bought me my razor. Not my ‘first’ razor. My one and only razor. And I had learnt from him – and all the men there – the art of male grooming. Every shave from then on would have been a sign that I had entered manhood. And it was not a thing to take lightly. Manhood means being responsible for yourself. And that means being able to wield a razor that could quite easily kill you if you don’t pay attention.

This isn’t just shaving, my friends. It’s a philosophy for living. It’s a philosophy for being a man. And I’m never going back because George was right in so many ways…

It is the best shave I’ve ever had.

I know that there’s that famous quote from Forrest Gump, that, “Life is like a box of chocolates…” but Life is actually more like a Las Vegas buffet:

Endless opportunities to indulge every taste, and no way you can have everything you’d like.

As with a Las Vegas Buffet, more and more of the guys I talk to seem to have the same problem, too much on their plate.

More and more is being demanded from us. Work wants more of our time for no extra money, rents are increasing, bills are on the up. There are friendships to maintain, relationships to contribute to, stuff to be bought, fun to be had…

On top of all of that is the increase in speed of the world. Well, not the world actually, that turns at the same pace. The sun rises and falls. But the thinking world has accelerated (if not been wiped out).

The result is that lots of us find ourselves strained, under pressure and stretched. We’re running from spot to spot, with little time to think. And when we’re stretched thin, we have to sacrifice or everything suffers.

And there’s the rub. Many of us aren’t willing to take a good look at what we’re doing, see where it’s heading (a life of total compromise), and take the tough choices to change things.

This thought process reminded me of a story I was told by a very tight Friend some years ago.

An expert in Time Management was speaking to a group of business students when he announced it was time for a quiz. He pulled out a large glass jar into which he placed a dozen fist size rocks. He asked the students if the jar was full and when they answered “yes” he proceeded to pour a bag of gravel into the jar. Again he asked the students if the jar was full

and, being more wary this time, they answered that it probably wasn’t. The lecturer then poured a bag of sand into the jar, followed by a pitcher of water.

When he asked the students what they thought was the point of the illustration one bright spark said it was to show that no matter how full your schedule there is always space for more.

“Wrong” said the tutor. “It teaches us that if you don’t put the big rocks in first then you will never fit them in. If you sweat the little stuff (the gravel, the sand) then you’ll fill your life with little things to worry about that don’t really matter and you’ll never have the real quality time you need to spend on the important stuff (the big rocks).”

So, when you find yourself in a situation where you find yourself overstretched and under pressure, there is really only one question which you should ask yourself:

What are your Big Rocks?

Last week the ‘youth culture’ (whatever that means) magazine, Vice, made a rather ill-advised decision to run a fashion article depicting female models recreating the suicides of famous writers.

Just reading that synopsis of the shoot makes you wonder how it got past the ideas stage – even more so when you realise that one of the suicides depicted was that of historian Iris Chang, who killed herself in 2004 and whose son is still around.

So, without doubt, a thoughtless move on the part of Vice. However, I’m not interested in jumping on the bandwagon of hate which has

been directed towards this subject in the past week – to be honest I haven’t even seen the pictures so I can’t comment further than as a response to the writing of others.

What has stuck with me more about the situation is that it seems to me that the taboo of suicide is one that is impossible to tackle – a Catch-22 Taboo.

To truly bust a taboo it cannot be put on a pedestal. It has to be opened out and be free for all discussion – which unfortunately means open for parody, ridicule and ill-informed debate.

But here’s the problem with suicide: the Samaritans have guidelines about how and when it should be discussed, which includes not reporting instances of people throwing themselves under a train. The idea behind this is to stop people getting ideas and so reduces copycat suicides.

And it seems to work. The Samaritans tell us that the voluntary restrictions on reporting subway suicides reduced their occurrence by 75% in Vienna and Toronto.

And yet in England and Wales around 24,000 people between the ages of 10 and 19 attempt suicide every year. Globally, around 1 million people kill themselves every year.

Now far be it from me to second guess the Samaritans ….

….but surely saying we can’t openly discuss suicide in all its forms makes it more of a taboo. Suicide exists; ignoring it won’t make it go away.

What we need to do is destroy the pedestal and make it an approachable subject. That way, those in the grip of suicidal thoughts know it is a subject they can talk about and they don’t have to suffer in silence.

Here at WMD, we are big believers that a Man has to deal with his own shit. That means being able to openly approach a situation and sort it out.

Think about it this way: if your washing machine breaks do you sit around ignoring it, hoping it’ll fix itself, or do you get a guy in who knows what he’s doing to fix it?

You break your arm. Do you stare at it in the expectation that it’ll magically fix itself, or do you go see a doctor who can mend it?

You’re suffering from a bout of depression, your thoughts turn suicidal … why is talking to an expert about that any different to dealing with the other issues by ‘getting a guy in’?

It is different because anyone can talk openly about washing machines and broken arms and no-one bats an eyelid. As soon as depression and suicide are raised we’re told we have to be careful what we say. That’s what makes it a taboo.

So let’s stop pussyfooting around here and make this an open conversation where we can encourage guys to sort out their own shit – with a little help – rather than suffer in silence. Otherwise those stats aren’t going to go down.

And we reckon a good place to start that conversation is with our friends over at CALM. As they say, ‘the silence is killing us’, so let’s make some noise.

A writer would say that about his book, wouldn’t he? But this is sincere.

This week the Guide offered me a level of comfort I really needed. And that’s the point of What Men Do. We started writing it as a means of using the lessons we’ve learnt through our own life experience to help other guys on the journey to find out what it means to be a Man today.

That’s not to say we hold the answers – we’ve said from the beginning that we’re still on the journey ourselves – but the thinking was that if we’ve been through it, chances are lots of guys will. As males we’re alone on this planet so by sharing our experiences we might ease the loneliness of other men and be of some solace to guys dealing with their own shit.

Over the last week I think What Men Do has helped me in this regard. We are a triumvirate (not so much The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit; more The Shouter, The Stubborn and The Sneaky), so we’ve three different sets of experiences and three perspectives on life. This means that some of the content of The Guide will naturally be drawn more from the well of one of us than the others.

I think I’m just starting to understand that some things aren’t explainable.

In the What Men Do Guide we’ve written about Mythos and Logos, the two means of comprehending life’s events (or non-events). Logos, translating as logical explanations. Why did the crop fail? Because it didn’t rain this winter.

Mythos, translating as, roughly, mythical – the unexplainable. Why didn’t it rain this summer?

In the Guide we also quote Pascal, “The heart has reasons that Reason cannot understand.” This is something you can only really comprehend through experience. It’s a strange thing to have your head point you one way but your heart drag you another.

And on this blog, we’ve discussed Thinking Man, Sensing Man and Feeling Man. At What Men Do we further this distinction as linking the three Men with, respectively, the head, the gut and the heart.

So, if we’ve studied, thought and written about it, why am I only just now coming to understand it? Because of Experience. Life’s lessons are all in Experience.

You have to have a broken heart, grieve, love, father for yourself to ‘get it’. I say ‘get it’ because ‘know it’ is too simplistic. And for me, that’s the greatest lesson for What Men Do. You have to get out there and live your life your way. No book can give you the answers; you’d have to write that book for yourself and only in hindsight. All a book can do if is offer solace and guidance.

That’s something every man needs to know.

If this has resonated with you, or you think The Guide might be of use to a guy you know, then we urge you to get them a copy or fire the blog their way.

We’re alone and dealing with our own shit here fellas, but knowing that other guys are going through it helps and makes sure the journey isn’t lonely.

And, for what it’s worth, we don’t take a penny from any book. The money made from each sale goes back into The Workshop, a youth charity in Yorkshire whose membership is roughly 70% male.

There’s a section in the ‘What Men Do’ Guide entitled ‘The Tribe of Heroes’, the theme of which is that Heroes exist all over the world.

A guy who follows the WMD Code can easily become dismayed by the Fear of finding himself on his tod; he’s trying to live a Life based on what he considers are Real Values which feed Self Respect and a sense of enriching the lives of others, verses the standard capitalist dogma of selfishness, greed and grab all you can whenever you can.

And sure, you can find other Heroes at home here in Yorkshire; from time to time we Yorkshiremen meet a Southerner who, somewhat to our amazement, turns out to be, well, OK…

            …even though he’s called Lance, drinks G&Ts and supports Chelsea.

Where you really become aware of Heroes worldwide is when you decide to do some backpacking abroad, doubly so if you don’t speak the native language and they don’t speak English.

In those circumstances what you find is that things happen that don’t happen in Huddersfield; a guy does you some kind of favour – it happened to me once in Southern Egypt where a guy dressed in the native Nubian costume shared his cold water when he could see I was at a point of exhaustion and was totally tapped out of money.

Kissed his ass? That’s the least I was prepared to do…but fortunately I didn’t have to. He was clearly overjoyed by my attempts at a profuse thanks made doubly so, I confess, when I lied and said I supported Manchester United.

But thinking about it since, that and other instances like it has made me realise how much our personal knowledge of the other guy is actually an inhibiting factor to a relationship. The knowledge – as in the case of the aforementioned Lance – prompts all the negatives in my own conditioning to rise to the surface, so instead of behaving spontaneously as I did at the fringes of the desert, I began – at least initially – to build on my prejudices.

And I ask you; how many times does this happen? Isn’t it the instinctive reaction of knowing too much? Aren’t we allowing ourselves to be separated from each other rather than bonding naturally as guys?

Sure, we’re Alone because we’re male. We’re programmed to clean up our own shit and that only Action Counts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we have to become untrusting. To have a sharpened awareness of Sensing, just as we had a couple of million years ago when we were the hunting band’s tracker, has always been a Positive force, allowing us now to sniff out fellow Heroes when in the old days it was a bison.  

But we guys haven’t really changed all that much, so let’s go along with the present system to earn a crust, but don’t let it fuck us up as human beings.

Three weeks ago the Labour Member of Parliament, Diane Abbott, made a major speech on what she described as the ‘crisis of masculinity’ which she claimed would lead to a generation of disaffected young men.

Somewhat hysterically, in our opinion, she claimed this ‘negative social pressure’ would ‘fuel homophobia, machismo and misogyny’.

Viewed from our base here in West Yorkshire, this alarmist propaganda, we think, is very much

based on the pressures of Big City living and is particularly London based. Having said that, there is much in the speech which we believe has a national validity, particularly where she speaks of unemployment, today’s economic downturn and the rapid economic changes which ‘warps male identity’.

Not surprising, all this has resulted in an outpouring of comments from various sources, most of which we find almost laughable in their naïve understanding of what it is to be a male – old or young. What is worse is that these observations have been written by males.

Two misunderstandings in particular stand out. The first is that that there is little grasp of the basic truth that males and females are programmed differently. Males push – for a shag, thereby asserting their drive as a masculine force; females pull – to be shagged, thereby asserting their desirability and, ultimately, their deeper purpose.

It’s amazing to us that the sensible observations originally highlighted by Germaine Greer in ‘The Female Eunuch’ and other early writers of the Women’s Lib movement have been distorted and extended by pseudo feminists with their own agenda to the extent that this gender-related programming has been (so innocently) absorbed by subsequent writers on social issues.

The other item which has been thrown up by Ms Abbott’s speech is that many of those who have responded to it have highlighted that, whereas there is always a response from women when issues that primarily concern them are raised, there is no equivalent response from men. The masculine mode remains silent,

a situation which, to these writers, is clearly a surprise.

But to any male who has a grasp of the aforementioned difference between the sexes, there is no surprise here at all. Whereas females draw strength from the camaraderie of talk and conversation, to males it is only Action that counts.

All this is spelled out very clearly in the What Men Do Guide (a copy of which we have sent to Ms Abbott) which was published last year for those young guys who have been finding the speed of change somewhat bewildering and who might value some clarity of ‘what it is to be a man’, at least as perceived by three Yorkshire lads.

It is because ‘Only Action Counts’ that males exist in a state of Aloneness whereby they have a primordial need to ‘take care of their own shit’.

Even their reluctance to consult the doctor bears witness to this male sense of self-sufficiency as being a major part of his Self Respect.

We’ve come to the

conclusion that whilst some of the thoughts expressed in Ms Abbott’s speech were alarmist and, by their very nature, deliberately dramatised for their negative aspects – particularly of violence – subsequent writers, whilst male themselves, have revealed a lamentable understanding of what it is to be a man.

A friend pointed me in the direction of a music video for Rudimental’s track, Waiting All Night.

My friend has read The Guide and sent me the video as an example of togetherness:

The music video follows the inspirational true-life story of Kurt Yaeger and his friends. He’s a pro BMX rider, and from the clip his Friends are no slouches either. The film begins showing the guys riding together. We gather that they are firm friends and ‘go back’. Kurt then has an accident. Cut to him asleep in a hospital bed, the same group of guys around him. As a result of the accident, he has had the lower part of his left leg amputated. He and his buddies are devastated.

We then follow the group as they go about healing their wounds. I say ‘their’, because these guys are so tight, that they are sharing the pain. We see them in physio together, wheeling him into parties, and riding as he cuts a

frustrated figure on the side.

Slowly but surely, Kurt develops the strength in what’s left of his leg, gets an artificial limb fitted and tentatively begins to learn to ride a bike for the second time in his life. All the while, his friends alongside, supporting.

The film ends with them riding together. All smiles.

Aside from it being a beautifully told story, it’s a wonderful example for the power of the Tribe: A group of guys so tightly bound that when one hurts, they all suffer.

In The Guide, we talk about how ultimately, as a man, you’re Alone. The reasoning being, life is your unique struggle. How and what you chose to do on the journey rests firmly at your door.

However, Alone and Lonely are very different things. What Men Do is surround themselves with those they love, that help them further their Purpose, challenge and support them ‘through thick and thin,’ as we say in Yorkshire. This is your Tribe.

While the journey is yours, and the path you choose is your decision alone, it’s true that, as the Turkish proverb says, ‘No road is long with good company.’