Call the Midlife (2 page)

PART 1

My Early Stab at the Male Menopause

A Top-Ten List of Buckets:

I was an early developer when it came to the symptoms of a midlife crisis, displaying some of the more obvious clichés at least ten years earlier than might usually be expected. At around the age of thirty-two my very public male menopausal hyperactivity was plain for all to see. Especially when it came to girls and cars and the vicarious paranoia of not knowing who I really was and where I was really at.

I was also suffering from the masochistic self-doubt and over-analysis that can send a person nuts. Perhaps this is why I was able to recognize the gathering clouds of similar happenings so clearly second time around. Perhaps that’s why I found myself whispering under my breath – oh no you don’t, not this time – we’ve been here before and we’re not going through all that nonsense again.

That said, my own initial experience of the insane desire to rip my life apart amidst the backdrop of wandering around a daily hinterland
of confusion and self-loathing was more of a mid-career crisis than anything else. Or to put it even more accurately, a mid-success crisis, the don’t-look-down-whatever-you do-syndrome.

I often ask my six-year-old son Noah how his day has been during the homeward school run each night, a question he frequently struggles to provide an answer to. I used to think this was because he was being lazy when it came to recalling the events of a few hours earlier. Over time, however, I could see it was something he really had an issue with, like I was suddenly asking him to speak a foreign language. This is because kids never ‘look down’. They live totally in the now, with perhaps a light dusting of the future, but as for the past – recent or otherwise – forget it.

My God, how is it then, as we get older, we become increasingly prone to tying ourselves up in the kind of knots that render us incapable of seeing the world for what it is and what it always has been: a plethora of joy and opportunity out there for us to enjoy and make the most of every day? How do we become so deaf, dumb and blind to what a gift this all is? How do we see it instead as some kind of troublesome chore that’s stopping us from doing whatever it is we’re really here for?

Obviously life gradually sends you mad, that much we know. What we have to do is try to recognize this and not be tempted to rail against it. Our biggest mistake is to assume we have a divine right to be better at the tough stuff the more tough stuff we experience. The reality is nothing of the sort. Kids don’t try to tame life because they don’t see the need, just as our elders no longer try because they know there is no point. The impasse we find ourselves in is the rite of passage from one state of mind to the next. So transparent on either side, so fuzzy in the middle.

That’s how come we turn into some kind of befuddled, insane Looney Tune for several years. An ill-thought-through cartoon character everyone around us is forced to put up with until we finally come out, battered and bruised, barely able to remember why and how all this self-doubt started in the first place.

If we make it through in one piece, that is.

This period of turmoil is simply too much for some poor souls to endure; the experience changes them beyond the point of no return, rendering re-entry to their old lives impossible. It is their destiny to be lost forever in a new world order of their own design: a new partner that’s younger and firmer but little else, a new wardrobe that is too tight and bright for them but no one likes to say, a new fitness regime that sucks all the personality out of them, leaving them looking more saggy than sexy.

Sure, taking time to regroup for the betterment of one’s future is a very wise use of one’s time, but it has to start from the point of self-congratulation as opposed to self-flagellation. Before we set about worrying what we haven’t got and how to go get it, we need to take a beat and reflect on what we have got and how to keep it.

In order to do this, maintenance is the key. Beginning with as high and wide a vantage point as possible from which to have a good look around and make some decent notes. Trying to skip this maintenance stage and move on is like abandoning a risotto and expecting it to stir itself: it just ain’t going to happen.

This ‘steady as she goes’ approach will help head off midlife clichés like the dreaded bucket list. The separated-at-birth, long-lost twin of the midlife crisis, said to have first appeared in the book
Unfair & Unbalanced: The Lunatic Magniloquence of Henry E. Panky
by Patrick M. Carlisle. Text reads thus:

Since then the phrase has enjoyed an exponentially stratospheric rise to fame and universal annoyance in equal measure. There are now millions of bucket lists that have been published in print and online to terrorize the world into various frenzies of tail-chasing ‘
before it’s too late’
.

Ride a Harley across America. Yawn.

Sky dive. Double yawn.

Get a tattoo. Triple yawn.

Have a threesome. All right, fair enough.

The thing about bucket lists
per se
is not what’s on them. Indeed, any of the above is perfectly acceptable and enjoyable as ‘a thing to do’. Just not as part of some synthetic emotional rollercoaster ride drawn up as an admission of what you might so far have missed out on.

I recently appeared on a TV show where they were discussing the ultimate Brit’s bucket list. I was one of several guests who was asked to add up how many experiences on the list they could already tick off.

One guest claimed not to have done any, which I found plain weird. Another said she’d done three. And someone else said they’d done seven. When it came to me, my answer was twenty-seven. Not that I am particularly adventurous. Perhaps it’s the opposite, perhaps I’m entirely predictable and have already been overcompensating in a major midlife way. But I’d like to think I’d come across them more as a matter of course.

I don’t know why I have a beef about things like this. I think it’s the same apathetic insincerity I hate about beach holidays. I mean it’s OK to lie in the sun, fading in and out of consciousness while listening to the waves gently lap against the shore for an hour or maybe two – but for a whole day, week or fortnight? What are they slipping into these guys’ mojitos – benzodiazepine and Night Nurse?

And as or fulfilling our lifelong dreams and ambitions in our midlife years, careful and respectful attention must be paid to what we really yearn for in the first place. For years, I ‘thought’ I’d like to move to Italy one day. But proper Italy, far away from the madding crowd, where they only spoke Italian, the days were long and the sun was high. Until myself and my girlfriend visited Brindisi in Puglia, which was exactly that. After three days, not only was I as red as a beetroot but we were desperate for our creature comforts, except the locals didn’t speak a word of English. This meant
they became more humpy with us the more we tried to explain ourselves, and we became more grumpy with them the less they understood anything we were saying. A simple lesson in the reality of fantasy that taught me it wasn’t Italy we liked, it was Italian restaurants in London that we could walk to.

Ergo, far more fulfilling than an ill-thought-through and embarrassingly predictable bucket list is an all guns-blazing, blood-and-thunder, fuck-it list. A list of brilliant things already in the bag. The mere thought of which should be enough to keep us smiling from ear to ear for the rest of our lives, regardless of what else society attempts to brainwash us into thinking might be a good idea.

I’m forty-nine years old. My thirties rocked, my forties were a mixed bag of calming down, realizing the magnificence of parenthood and becoming a safe pair of hands at the BBC. As far as I can figure I’ll be pretty much spent at seventy-five. I will probably be able to do most of the things I can now and still want to do until at least sixty-five.

And so it was with this in mind that I decided to embark upon the notion of giving myself one hundred straight days to set up the rest of this party called life. One hundred days dedicated to the planning of the next six thousand or so. That seems like a worthwhile thing to do, don’t you think?

Hence
Call the Midlife
.

Notwithstanding gross misfortune, our fifties should be the golden age of life. When we can still physically do pretty much whatever takes our fancy. Mentally we are streets ahead of where we’ve ever been. We also have more influence, more sway; we know more people who are useful to us and us to them. Even the odd tinge of wisdom begins to creep in. Oh, what joy there is with each new slice of self-realization. Self-acceptance. Self-awareness. Self-understanding.

We have finally begun to be able to discern what’s important and what’s a waste of time. With every passing day, time itself nudges its way closer to the top of the ‘most wanted’ list. We know who the friends we should be making more of are, and those we should be
cutting loose – both for their sake and ours.

But of course there is an issue. Even though I am fully aware of all of the above, as we all are, none of us have the first clue as to how to go about delivering the half-time team-talk to ourselves that we could so crucially benefit from. The right combination of words and encouragement that will have us bouncing out back on to the pitch, gagging for more.

We almost certainly have fewer summers and Christmases left than those we’ve already seen but we have the wherewithall to make them fuller, more rewarding and more memorable than any that have gone before.

Add so began my quest for received wisdom. First, by knocking on the doors of a group of life’s illuminati I believed could tell us midlifers some of the more high-priority things we need to know. Anyone who might be able to help us improve our chances of identifying the most advantageous course to follow in this most priceless quarter of a century or so we have left.

We are the children of the technological revolution whose mums and dads stood up to the Nazis so we could be free to listen to The Beatles, get stoned in the company of
Dark Side of the Moon
and watch Noel Edmonds on
Deal or No Deal
every afternoon.

Therefore we owe it to them at least to show we are not going to allow our middle-age optimism and enthusiasm to be thwarted by that infuriating phrase, MIDLIFE CRISIS, every time we tinker and make a change for the better.

Comrades, it is our duty – indeed it is our calling – to declare to the world that our proactive decisions are ours and ours alone. And that we do not want to shag our secretary, our boss, our husband’s friend, or our sisters- or-brothers-in-law.

‘Midlife Crisis’ is a phrase we’ve been lumbered with long enough. Ever since its appearance in a magazine article published in New York one weekend back in 1967, penned by a journalist who I can only imagine was stuck for an idea. I can hear him now: ‘What are they thinking, what are they doing? Why are they so pathetic as to feel they so desperately and embarrassiningly need to try to
reignite the cold and sad ashes of their youth to make up for the fact they can’t deal with the fact they are now OLD?’

This wasn’t
our
midlife crisis he was talking about. It was his. Before his article, no one had ever suffered a ‘Midlife Crisis’ because the term didn’t exist. I shall write it, therefore it shall be. Just two words, but two words that forty-eight years on continue to blight perfectly reasonable and justifiable aspirations of hundreds of millions of wholly decent, energetic, forward-thinking, forward-looking, thirtysomethings, fortysomethings and now fiftysomethings.

Generation after generation, we have been tarnished by his apathetic excuse for his own lack of brio, and hoodwinked into asking ourselves ‘Why should we?’ instead of ‘Why shouldn’t we?’

Except, I suppose, without his monochrome negativity, lethargy, pessimism and all-round gloomy funk I would never have had reason to write this book.

And you know, that’s the thing with losers, if we listen to what they’re really saying, they push us to a better place.

Always.

Panic Attack

A midlife moment of reflection can be sparked off by anything. The death of a friend. A change in work circumstances. The breakdown of a long-term relationship. Going to see a band we used to like when we were younger but haven’t seen for ages. A particular film. Becoming a grandparent. Taking a long drive on our own. Looking in the mirror. Standing on the scales. Having an accident. Even peeking through the curtains one morning in a particularly vulnerable state of mind and seeing the grass only as something that’s going to need cutting as opposed to something alive, lush and beautiful.

All of the above are tremours of panic. But good panic. Panic that is there to help us. Our internal alarm clock telling us it’s time to take stock and make a gravy.

Panic therefore in many ways instantly means – DON’T PANIC!

Panic having already done its job.