Read it in Books:How Not To Be A Boy.

"One way of imagining life is that it's a competition between love and death. Death always wins, of course, but love is there to make its victory a hollow one. That's what love is for"

"If you want a vision of masculinity imagine Dr Frankenstein being bum-raped by his own monster while shouting , 'I'm fine, everyone! I'm absolutely fine!'

Rave reviews from Marina Hyde, Stephen Fry, and Sarah Millican are nice to have, J.K.Rowling and Dawn French too, but if I was Robert Webb (and, let's face it, he probably didn't have much say on this) I'd have left the one from The Daily Mail off. If I'd seen it it would have put me off buying How Not To Be A Boy.

My mum, I suspect, has no such qualms and as it was a gift from her I didn't need to worry about that. It was a generous and thoughtful gift too as I'm a big fan of Webb. I adored Peep Show (who didn't?), loved his and David Mitchell's Back from 2017, and when I've seen him interviewed he's always come across as thoughtful, articulate, intelligent, and, just as importantly, funny.

How Not To Be A Boy is divided into two 'Acts'. The first, split into eight chapters, is about how boys are supposed to be (sport loving, assertive, and brave) and what they're not supposed to be (tearful, gay, or virgins) and the second, six chapters, does the same for men. Who must be organised, good at directions, and confident but must not need therapy and must not take themselves too seriously.

There's been a lot of understandably earnest writing in recent years about how male toxic behaviour isn't just dangerous for women but for other men and, ultimately, for the body that is host to all that toxicity. Much of it, from women and men, has been excellent. My hope for, and expectations of, Webb's book was that it would, indeed, be compellingly excellent but also that it would be laugh out loud funny and even, as suggested in the blurb, surprisingly raw and emotional in places.

A big ask but one I felt he'd be up to. It was two pages in before I first laughed (as Webb imagines impressing a girl with the Van Gogh prints and politically correct posters in the bedroom she'll almost certainly never enter) and there were several more chuckles before, about ten pages in, Webb recounts sitting in his own garden late at night drinking two more bottles of red wine alone long after his wife, pregnant with their first child, had gone to bed.

The clarity of the recollection and the obvious personal reckoning it evoked in Webb nearly set the tears off (as did a revelation hinted at in an imaged dialogue between his 15 and 43 year old selves and, most of all, his memories of his mum's dying days and her eventual death) and it certainly became the launching point for Webb to discover what it was that had made him the man he was and why that wasn't making him happy. Which, of course, eventually led to this book.

A book that follows him through a childhood that, like so many, was both happy and sad. Happy times include singing along with his mum to Berni Flint on Opportunity Knocks and sliding down the stairs on the family's first Continental Quilt. Yet sadness hung in the air following the death of an elder sibling before Webb was even born. The shadow of that death haunts the young Webb's Lincolnshire home and lurks in the marriage of his parents like a silent ghost

Beside the happy things and the sad things there are demonstrably bad things too. His drunk aggressive father coming home from the pub in one of his tempers and beating the kids for sleights, either real or perceived. The same father's reputation for cheating on his wife and, of course, his poor mum's early death which, more or less, orphans Webb and his much younger step-sister before he's even left home for university.

This is life. This is everyone's life. A mix of beautiful, mundane, comforting, terrifying, and tragic events. Processing it and coming to terms with it is what makes us human but what if we can't? What if we've been conditioned not to? What if we've been told to 'man up' instead of dwelling on things that have happened to us?

Webb smartly underlines how by telling boys to stop expressing their feelings we're telling them to stop even feeling those feelings, to be ashamed of them even. Don't feel sadness, don't feel grief, don't feel fear, don't feel anxiety. That's not what boys should do. Certainly not men. Instead subsume all those feelings into one big all-encompassing feeling. That of anger.

But that anger has to come out somewhere and, of course, it comes out in drunken pub fights, in shouting at one's children, and in verbal, emotional, and physical violence of one's partner. Webb's four years younger than me so many of his references hit the bullseye and all of them seem accurate. Terry Wogan on Radio 2, Fuzzy-Felt, Lester Piggott's tax returns, BJ and the Bear, WH Smith 'Back to Skool' signs, shirts vs skins in PE at school, "dossing about", and the boy's playground chants of "Who wants to play (insert various game)? No girls allowed".

Elsewhere there are stories that should be relatable to bored British working class youth of all ages (drawing pictures in the condensation of window panes, your mum's fish fingers, etc;) but while anyone, Peter Kay, can reel off a list of things from days gone by and make funny observations about them, Webb manages to capture the feelings of fear that fill our teenage years, how it feels to be an uncertain boy in a man's body, the horror of having to share communal showers after 'games' when everyone's at a different stage of puberty, and the weird belief that the 'gayest' thing a boy can do is hang around with girls.

Webb's got a great turn of phrase. When his mum, Pat, meets his stepdad, Derek, it's "not so much a courtship as an Anschluss", when he slow dances with a girl to Do They Know It's Christmas (!) he notes that "even if you ignore the romantically underperforming topic of starving children" it still moves quickly into an "anthemic knees-up" quite unsuitable to an erection section, and, while imagining removing a splinter from a Dr Who assistant's vagina and having his first orgasm describes his younger self as the "Doogie Howser MD of space cunnilingus". He even drops in a self-aware reference to Super Hans, his character Jez's pal, and idol, in Peep Show.

I nearly spat my beer out when Webb, after listing all the faults (perceived or actual) of a former love rival, concludes by deciding "he's a cunt. A more open-and-shut case of a cunt" he could "barely imagine". But for all the Jimmy Hill chinny reckons, for all the Horace Goes Skiing, for all the casual homophobia and memories of calling girls 'dogs' and eveybody 'spastics', for all the wrapping your exercise books up in brown paper, the stories of teenage boys shagging their girlfriends while watching videos of Krull, and the kids breakdancing to No More Lonely Nights by Paul McCartney there's a general sense of nostalgia not just for times gone by but also for times that never quite happened and things that were never quite said.

It's a wonderful evocation of growing up, discovering your sexuality, discovering your political affiliations, and coming to terms with the body you've been born in and the thoughts and feelings you can't prevent coming. Of how, in Webb's words, girls and women pick up the bills when boys and men turn their fear and grief into anger. By the time I'd finished the book I'd cried many times. Tears both of joy and of sadness.

So thanks mum, not just for giving me a book full of actually quite filthy jokes about wanking, fingering, and licking out Dr Who's assistant but also for giving me a book about how growing up isn't something that stops when we reach puberty or leave home or get married, about what it is to be a good person in a world that doesn't always want you to be, and what it is to be able to both love and to be loved in return.