Opinion: ‘We should keep offering advice… even if it takes years to make sense,’ says William Porteous

Diss Express columnist, William Porteous, shares his view

It was Reading Festival, sometime in the early 00s, that suspended golden blur of summers when you could eat crisps for breakfast and nobody died of it.

My mate and I had somehow charmed our way backstage by pretending to be someone’s nephew, and there he was: Evan Dando. Hair like a lion that had just been through a wind tunnel, denim barely holding onto his frame, a smile that said, “I’ve seen things… and some of them were legal.”

We hovered awkwardly, drunk on warm lager and youthful audacity. He noticed us immediately. Or at least, he noticed the joint we were trying to light in the wind. He wandered over, asked for a puff, and sat down beside us like it was a perfectly normal Tuesday afternoon, not the eve of a headline slot.

He told us a story about a motel, a dog that wasn’t his and something about a French woman who only listened to Neil Young bootlegs. None of it made sense, and all of it made perfect sense.

I must’ve looked a bit glassy-eyed because he turned to me and said, “Don’t let the bad days define your good ones. You don’t need to be sad to be sincere.” Then he gave me a little wink, stood up and announced ‘I’m gonna have a moment with the toilet’. Which, in Dando-ese, was code for: I’m off to do drugs.

And just like that, he was gone.

The moment stuck with me for a while. That little gem of sun-drenched wisdom nestled in my brain like an uncracked peanut.

I kept turning it over during the hangover years, repeating it to mates at 3am in kitchen parties as if I’d written it myself. Sometimes I believed it. Other times I thought he was just high and quoting someone else.

But here’s the thing: you can’t force understanding. That’s the problem with advice—it’s a gift often handed over decades too early. Like giving a 12-year-old a copy of A tree grows in Brooklyn and expecting her to nod solemnly and say, ‘Ah yes, the crushing inertia of mental illness—I get it’.

I’ve given advice, too. To friends. To exes. To passing strangers on night buses. None of it landed. “Don’t text him again,” I told a mate who then married the guy. “Don’t start a band with your girlfriend,” I warned another, who is now both single and deeply in debt. Advice, it turns out, is only useful when it’s asked for. Even then, it’s usually filed under Interesting But Will Ignore.

Now, I’m a dad. My eldest daughter has just discovered sarcasm and it’s weaponised daily. I tried to explain empathy the other week. She blinked once, asked if she could have a water gun and then farted dramatically while exiting the room. The sincerity, it turns out, is not mutual.

But that’s okay. Maybe she’ll remember it later. Maybe 20 years from now she’ll be backstage at some AI version of Glasto, chatting to a washed-up frontwoman from a forgotten synth-punk band and some truth will fall from their lips, land in her lap like a feather and she’ll think: “Oh… Dad said something like that once. Between the fart jokes.”

I’ve learned the trick is to speak plainly and then get out the way.

I tried the whole earnest dad routine—kneeling to her eye level, using phrases like ‘let me tell you something about life’ – and she just stared at me like I was trying to sell her life insurance. I get it. I was the same.

My own dad once said to me, “Just try your best.” I mean it’s a legit and frankly standard piece of advice. I think it was before an exam or something. It was his tone that helped it resonate. At the time it sounded painfully underwhelming. Now I think it’s the kindest and most realistic bit of advice anyone’s ever given me; I’ll to check my subconscious though.

Back then, during those burnished summers where time felt like it melted rather than passed, I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted, or how to fold a tent. But I knew that something was happening – that the world might just be big enough for people like me, especially if people like Evan Dando were wandering around in it, semi-lucid, sharing stoned wisdom with daft teenagers.

Of course, advice isn’t magic. It’s not a map. It’s more like a flare – briefly illuminating the path, burning out before you get your bearings. It lingers if you’re lucky and if you’re really lucky, you’re ready for it when it does.

I wasn’t ready then. I wanted life to feel cinematic and strange, and advice felt like subtitles on a film I was trying to watch with the sound off.

But eventually, you catch up to the meaning. One day you’re wiping hummus off a toddler’s forehead, or watching your teenager roll her eyes so hard she nearly dislocates something, and you remember it – some random line whispered in smoke and noise: you don’t need to be sad to be sincere.

And you think… yeah. Okay. I get it now.

We should keep offering advice. Not because we expect it to be heard but because, somewhere down the line, someone might remember the sound of it. Like a lyric that didn’t make sense when you were 15, but floors you at 40.

So I tell my daughter things. About kindness. About patience. About not trusting anyone who’s really into crypto. I say them gently and I don’t expect them to land. But maybe one day they will.

And maybe, just maybe, she’ll sit down next to some daft kid trying to light a joint in the wind and pass on a line that once made no sense at all. Until it did.