What We’re Teaching Our Sons. Owen Booth

and the origins of everything. We’re explaining how reality as we know it probably expanded, by accident, from an infinitely small singularity, on borrowed energy that will eventually have to be paid back. We’re trying to make it clear that we’re all potentially the result of a single overlooked instance of cosmological miscounting.

      Somehow, we’ve come on a stag do to Amsterdam with our sons in tow.

      It’s not going well.

      It’s late in the year and Amsterdam is spectacularly beautiful. Along the Herengracht the low afternoon light paints the tall houses in colours that take our breath away. In the Rijksmuseum, the Vermeers and Rembrandts seem to glow from within. On Keizersgracht the most beautiful women in the world ride past us on vintage bicycles.

      But whatever way you look at it, this is no place for fathers to bring their sons.

      The older sons want to sneak off and look in the windows of the brothels and hang around outside the sex shows, and the younger ones keep being nearly run over by all the beautiful cyclists.

      ‘How was the world made?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘How did this all be true? Even before the olden days?’

      We try to explain about false vacuums and the weak anthropic principle, about Higgs fields and the arrow of time, but it’s no good. Half the dads have already been out to a coffee shop ‘for a coffee’, and the other half are waiting for their turn.

      ‘But what about even before then?’ the younger sons ask us. ‘What was there before the bang?’

      ‘Well, before then … there wasn’t really a then for things to be before.’

      Nobody is convinced by that. We don’t blame them. This whole trip was a terrible idea.

      A group of the dads has got lost. The combination of all the weed and the conversation about primordial nucleosynthesis in the first seconds of the universe has tipped them over the edge. We send out a search party, roam the beautiful Golden Age streets. We keep getting invited into sex shows, decline politely.

      After a couple of hours, we find the missing dads standing in a row outside the windows of a brothel, stoned, staring, confused, at the women in the windows.

      We gently guide them away, apologise to everyone.

      We haven’t even started on the drinking competitions.