Three men sit around the table in a busy pub-diner. One reaches into a bag and pulls out... a velociraptor, a stegosaurus, and the inevitable t-rex. Not life-size, you understand, but not tiny either.
For the next fifteen minutes, they point, and discuss. Perhaps surprisingly, they do not stage any mock battles.
All three are old enough to be grandparents, so perhaps the dinos aren’t for them. Perhaps. They seem to enjoy them all the same.
I think back, to the chat of generations of pub-dwellers, anything but anything-that-mattered, how their bosses were idiots, how they could get more out of their football team’s players, how “the wife” was more of a burden – or, at best, a handy domestic appliance - than someone who was keeping them afloat, being their adult, preventing them from spiralling downwards into their own lack of meaning.
Those were hard men. Tough men. But tough in strictly circumscribed ways. They could never have brought a child’s toy out in their local pub. Of course, they would laugh derisively at the suggestion, and question your sanity for even mentioning the possibility. But, no matter how hard they put you down, they still couldn’t do it. Not to save their own lives. To do something like that would brand them with a name they could pass on to their children. The ridicule would result in someone getting punched, someone getting ostracised. And they depended in so many ways on the strength of their group. So, of course they couldn’t do it.
They were tough, in a world that demanded it of them. But not tough enough to be anything else.
And now, today, we have these guys. Dinosaurs. Not fighting.
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