Call the Midlife (16 page)

‘When it comes to your sleeping environment, remember it’s the one place you will continue to spend more of your life in than any other, so take care when designing and furnishing it. Make it the most beautiful, aesthetically pleasing place to be. It’s amazing how much time, money and effort people put into designing and fitting out a kitchen compared to how little of all those three they employ when it comes to the boudoir.’

I mentioned this last point to my wife the following weekend when she asked me how the chat with Guy had gone.

She vehemently disagreed.

‘But a kitchen is much more complicated than a bedroom, with lots more unique decisions called for,’ she protested. On the face of it, perhaps; but all Guy is saying is that we should take care to notice and do what we can to give ourselves the best possible chance of drifting off peacefully. Good light exclusion, sleep-friendly ambient temperature and humidity, quiet, comfort, a sense of order, a lack of fuss, space. I’ve even gone as far as to ban bedside cabinets as they merely provide storage for yet more chaos in the form of coins, leaflets, adaptors, pens, pencils and bloody loom bands!

‘Clutter is like our past: we may not be able to see it, but we know it exists and that, as many insomniacs will confirm, is one of the chief culprits when it comes to having our precious sleep stolen from underneath us.’

After meeting this genius, sleep became my number one priority, above all else. I changed my diet, eating patterns, everything. I especially focused on making more time to enjoy my sleep, which I now do. I also kept a sleeping diary and realized I am a six- to seven-hours-a-night man. Any less than that and I really can feel the difference the next day.

Surprisingly, the better I sleep the more tired I feel when my alarm goes off in the morning, but the more rested I feel as the day unfolds. I definitely concentrate better for longer and I’m far less irritable. I still have a long way to go, but I’m on the right road.

What a Guy.

Thank you, Doctor.

Money

Top Ten Things That Money’s Good For:

The Bible says, ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ Well, I’m not so sure they’re going to want it after we, the not so meek, have fudged it up like we are doing.

Abba on the other hand once famously sang ‘It’s a rich man’s world’. Well, I’m not so sure about that either. And nor were they, once they’d divorced each other and had to begin all over again.

A lot of rich people I know or have met seem to be thoroughly miserable. As if some vital part of them is missing and they don’t know where it’s gone. Last seen perhaps sometime before the first million was officially on the scorecard, but no sightings thereafter.

What’s really mad is that most self-made rich folks have long since forgotten why they started doing whatever it was that led them to amass their fortune in the first place. Now just doing it because it defines who they are to people who don’t really matter. Often at the cost of everything else that’s important to them. And
most of which can’t be bought anyway.

I was caught in this selfsame trap for a while, one of the reasons I went fruit da loop for the best part of ten years.

When I was a kid we never had any money. That’s why I always wanted to get my hands on some. No different from why people want to jump out of an aeroplane or climb Mount Everest. I just wanted to know what it felt like.

Fortunately for me, I also discovered early on in life that going out to work was something I enjoyed. Since the by-product of that was money, my financial dilemma began to work itself out pretty much from the moment I became a teenager.

Little did I know back then how big my pile would end up. From a £1.25-a-week paper round to being hunted down by the stock-market wolves to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds.

Mistakes are merely rehearsals for getting it right next time, so here’s what my experience of (not exactly) rags (but not far off) to riches has taught me.

Not only can money not buy you happiness, it can’t buy you a good time either, not even for five minutes. You can only
have
a good time, you can’t
buy
one. Easy for me to say, I know, and I realize I may be playing with fire here, but all money can really do is buy you an expensive time.

That’s it.

That’s all.

Just like owning a television can’t guarantee there’s going to be anything good to watch. Or inheriting a Fender Stratocaster from dear old uncle Sholto means you’re suddenly going to turn into the next Mark Knopfler.

Whether we get out of something what we want, regardless of its physical value, is down to what we, and the people around us, do with it. The New Radicals sang, ‘You only get what you give’, which is true except when it comes to writing out a cheque. ‘You get what you pay for’ is another grossly inaccurate phrase. The truth is, ‘You get what you do with what you pay for.’

Cool people who handle their success best have one thing in
common. Those that have a few quid don’t worry about it and carry on more or less regardless, while those that don’t have much do exactly the same. This is because between them they have realized that, somewhere along the line, money has got too big for its boots and has been overplaying its hand for years.

The world’s money is controlled by the few who make lots of it but to little real advantage to themselves or anyone else. The money markets dominate the news, yet few of us can do the first thing to influence them.

The tail is most definitely wagging the dog where this one is concerned.

Following the financial crash of 2008 the stock markets of the world have all seen record increases in between. Yet the aftermath of how they operated before that continues to devastate the pockets of the vast majority of people who had nothing to do with what went wrong.

Quite apart from the well-documented case of Greece, little Cyprus was nearly bankrupted last year because she couldn’t come up with a €6 billion downpayment to secure another bailout from the EU, yet this is the same amount our own national debt here in the UK increases by every two days. This is hypocrisy of the most audacious kind. Yet we’re all happy to collectively bury our heads in the sand as if somehow this makes sense and what we’re experiencing is merely a blip in an otherwise well-oiled financial machine.

Money is not working. At the time this book went to print, ‘The markets’ were down again to a new three-year low.

Who cares?

It’s all a massive con, as simple as that, and the sooner someone stands up and says as much, the better.

Yet still we live in denial. Govern-‘mental’ institutions have taken to applying knee-jerk reaction austerity fiscal policies as some sort of answer.

The habitually laissez-faire French now have a president who thinks emergency taxes of 75 per cent on anyone in France with more than half a baguette and an ounce of Boursin in their basket
is the way forward. The eternally profligate Italian government has brought in a new duty on anyone who owns a nice old car, let alone a nice shiny new one. And as for the poor Portuguese, whom I know a lot of, they now pay more VAT than anyone else in the history of the world.

And all this because of the stock exchanges, a system which began with the simple ethos of doing precisely what it said over the shop. You want some of my beans, you gotta give me some of your potatoes, or some wool, or some chickens or your granny, whatever – but you gotta give me something. That’s how this is going to work, that’s how we’re going to do business here.

What could possibly go wrong?

Answer: pretty much everything.

Because one day, out of nowhere, along wanders someone with a piece of paper bearing these words: ‘I promise to pay the bearer of this note whatever I need to for him to give me some of his parsnips, just not any time soon if that’s OK.’

A promise from a stranger to a stranger. Ooh, that’s gonna work.

Two people who have never met before, one with actual goods, one with only a piece of paper and a few cobbled-together words on it. And for some unholy and terrible reason the farmer with the booty agreed to take the worthless promissory note from the charlatan.

That, my friends, was the birth of the whole sorry fiasco, the beginning of the end. Why oh why oh why did the farmer ever say yes? And why have we all been saying, almost orgasmically, yes yes yes ever since?

The dreaded, awful, evil, fraudulent, terrible promissory note. And as if that wasn’t stupid enough, we then took the same bait by signing up for the credit-card system. The credit-card holder does not even have the old promissory notes so favoured by his forefathers; but if he is willing to commit to at least trying to get his hands on some any time this side of Armageddon, and passing them straight over, then now – even that’s OK!!!

INSANITY.

‘Always do what you’ve always done and you’ll always get what you’ve always got.’

More and more credit means more and more financial crashes and more mopping up the spoils, by the ever more elite, who always make sure they have enough ready cash and buying power for when the world’s going cheap.

CREDIT CREDIT CREDIT EQUALS CRASH CRASH CRASH.

It doesn’t matter that credit doesn’t work for the simple reason that most people who can’t pay today still won’t be able to pay tomorrow. If they could, they would, but they can’t so they won’t. And what’s even more soul-destroying is that the vast majority of those people will now be in debt UNTIL THEY DIE, having spent money they usually don’t have on things they will never be able to afford and clearly don’t need.

Mrs Thatcher may have been a crazy old dingbat, but one thing she was right about was ‘NEVER SPEND MORE THAN YOU EARN with the exception of a mortgage and perhaps a motor car’. Easy for her to say, married to a millionaire businessman, I know, but I always got the feeling she would abide by that rule of hers regardless.

Money is a worry to all but the wisest of people. People who haven’t got it invariably want it; people who have it are worried they might lose it. And then there are those who somehow have squared the whole money circle for what it really is: an unworkable nonsense, probably hatched by two winos in a tavern to see if they could get the barman to give them their next drink without having to part with an actual shilling.

Well, whoever it was, it worked then and it’s still working now, but money’s days are numbered. Like us when it comes to climate change: if we don’t come up with a new twist soon, we’ll both be toast this side of 2030.

I believe we may be the generation to witness the death of money. We talk about the birth of the virtual age with the Internet and
cyberspace, and so on, but money beat them all to it. Money was the first virtual egg to hatch in the incubator.

Virtual wealth.

Virtual value.

Virtual madness.

Not that money isn’t useful full stop, of course it is. Apart from the essentials in life, there is no doubt that me having a bit more of it than I used to has kept my mum alive. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer almost seven years ago, I was fortunate enough to be able to pay for a drug she would not have been entitled to on the NHS. It almost definitely saved her life.

Same goes for when my wife was expecting for the second time and was diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy. Had she not been seen late one night by a private consultant, she would not be here today. She was suffering from internal bleeding which, had it not been spotted and dealt with, would have seen her off before the morning.

I know this financial advantage is unfair in the grand scheme of things and am aware it will make some people apoplectic with rage, but I seriously doubt those same people wouldn’t have done the same thing if they were in my shoes.

Money also makes worries about day-to-day bills less of an issue and I can’t say I miss the fear and trepidation I used to experience when approaching the hole in the wall towards the end of the month. Will it or won’t it? To dispense or not to dispense, that is the question.

I’ve also learnt, the hard way, it pays to get hold of your dough before it gets a hold of you, as is so often the case with self-made new money. I’m not talking so much about people trying to relieve you of your hard-earned cash, as people relieving you of days and weeks of your life you’ll never get back.