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Where does it come from-this idea that a man reaches a certain point in his life when all is peaceful and calm? When there are no more irrational passions and unfulfilled yearnings, and no desire to-one last time-spill his seed on the passenger seat of some inappropriate ride?
‘Stop dreaming of the quiet life, ‘cos it’s the one we’ll never know,’ sang the Jam when I was young, and I have always cherished the wisdom of those words.
A man never gets to a point when trouble of some shade or another is completely out of the picture. The mid-life crisis is born of the illusion that nothing exciting should happen to you once you are in the far-flung corners of youth.
And it is just not true.
What has gone wrong since I became a grown-up? Oh, the usual. Divorce. Bereavement. Money troubles. Promiscuity. Coveting my neighbour’s wife. Coveting my neighbour’s car. Coveting my neighbour’s lawn mower. A bit more bereavement. A few more money troubles. Did I mention the coveting?
But none of these domestic nightmares-which began in my late twenties and went on for ten years or more-could be considered a mid-life crisis. It was all just … the stuff that happens in a lifetime. And what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger-unless it’s a baseball bat or something.
In many ways, the middle bit of life is where we start getting it right. You get divorced-but then you meet someone lovelier, and you get married to her. Your parents die, but the years go by and you realise how lucky you were to have that woman as your mother and that man as your father.
You see that this is not a mid-life crisis at all. It is merely Mother Nature doing what she is obliged to do: kick you firmly in the testicles.
As time goes by, inevitably you have a lot more money than you had when you were seventeen or twenty-one. Yet that does not stop the money troubles of your middle years from being as real as a tumour. So you grit your teeth, you do good work and-eventually-good things start to happen. The best things.
Life is infinitely better now than when I wore DMs every day of my life. At twenty-two I lived in a bedsit in Crouch End where you had to sleep on the right side of the mattress when it rained because water came through the ceiling. Even if it all falls apart tomorrow, even if I forget my name and have fragments of jam sponge cake on my unshaven chin, I am never going to live anywhere as rotten as that again.
Youth is hard for most of us. It is different for girls, but boys are often lonely because the girls their age want older boys-boys with money, boys with cars, boys who know how to talk to them.
Youth is frustrating. You are rarely doing the job you want and, in your late teens and early twenties, life can seem as though it is slipping away far more desperately than it ever does in your thirties and forties.
Mid-life crisis? You mean doing the job you love? You mean a ceiling that doesn’t leak and a woman who loves you? You mean having a couple of quid in your pocket? You mean swapping the bus for a BMW X5-and then swapping that for a Harley? Sounds pretty good to me, this mid-life crisis caper.
The trouble is that society confuses being a middle-aged man with being a freshly made corpse. A lot of what gets put down to a mid-life crisis is actually just a man revealing the first signs of life that he has shown in years.
I would never suggest that a man should give his heart to the first girl he meets who is young enough to be his daughter. And it is not a good idea to start riding motorbikes without having considered the possibility that you might fall off. But if you do, then don’t beat yourself up. This is not a mid-life crisis-this is you, still breathing.
My father was a middle-aged man at twenty. He had killed many men and he had seen many men die. The top half of his body was a starburst of scar tissue. For the next forty years, until he died at the age of sixty-two, he had hard, black, jagged bits of shrapnel from a German grenade worming their way out of his legs. Still a young man, he wanted nothing more than to work, raise a family and tend his garden.
But even my dad-who often gave me the impression that he had had his fill of the outside world-discovered a new passion in his middle years.
He took up sailing. Every year he went down to Cowes, where he impressed the posh boys with his nautical skills. Was that a mid-life crisis? No, it was just my father rediscovering his passion for the open sea, and messing about in boats, and sailing. It was just my father remembering that he was alive, but he would not be forever. And of course it was a lot less trouble than having him elope with a Latvian lap dancer.
This is not to make the case that age is inherently better than youth. There are many slings and arrows in your middle years-the closer proximity of death, the way hangovers last for days, the desire of GPs to give you a prostate examination every time you bend over to tie your Asics trainers.
But where did it come from, this idea that there’s a point in life when a man should stop seeking fulfilment, stop looking for meaning and stop having fun?
And when did we get it into our heads that at a certain stage in life troubles melt away, relationships stop falling apart and our hearts are no longer capable of ecstasy, or of breaking? That only happens on the day we die and until then life is full of varying measures of joy and pain, and it doesn’t matter a damn whether you happen to be sporting a six-pack or a family pack.
The mid-life crisis is a myth designed to keep men tame, neutered and in their place. It doesn’t exist. Fight against it. Buy a motorbike. Learn to play bass. Trek the Himalayas. Buy a Porsche 911. Learn Mandarin. Fall in love. Give up your job. Actually, better not give up your job-the passions that come later in life are only made possible because you are no longer on the tight budget of youth.
And there are plenty of middle-aged women who fancy a change of direction-or the bloke who lives down the street. There are plenty of women who get sick of their jobs, or their shagged-out old husbands, or who want to dance the Tango in Buenos Aires before they die. And why not? Let there be fire in your eyes and flashing limbs. Dump the husband. Fly to Argentina. Enjoy every sandwich. You’re a long time cremated.
But somehow it is only a mid-life crisis when a man does it-when he decides that, now he comes to think of it, he doesn’t want to be a chartered accountant. He wants to kiss the face of God.
We should all be allowed to kiss the face of God, whether it comes in the form of a bigger bike or a younger lover or the rolling sea. How else to respond to our mortality?
There is no cure for death, no age limit for dreams, and no escape from who we are and always will be-mortal, fallible creatures, full of love and longing.
And if the young lover breaks your heart, or if you fall off your Harley, or if Buenos Aires is a disappointment-if you make a fool of yourself-well, that is what we do, and what we have always done.
That is not a mid-life crisis.
It’s just the latest in a long line of cock-ups.
Two When Yobs Swear (#ulink_8d1202fe-7bcb-51e6-839f-e120f44a477b)
Sooner or later you will find yourself in a situation. It may not happen for ten years. It could be tonight. But it is coming-be sure of that – and when it arrives you will have the choice between the only two buttons that really matter on your biological dashboard.
Fight or flight?
You might be in a bar. You might be in a restaurant. It could be at the end of your road or it could be on a tropical island. You might be standing outside your home. The location doesn’t matter. This is how it will be: you will be confronted by in-appropriate behaviour that intrudes upon those you love. Effing and blinding and talk of a graphically sexual nature. You know the kind of thing. And, in an instant, you will have to decide – Do I say something?
Or do I say nothing?
This is the terrible thing. This is the heart of the matter. You will not be alone. You will be in company – with your girlfriend or wife, or with your children, even if they have yet to be born-people who look to you to protect them from the worst of this world.
And there will be a cackling mob of pimply cavemen, every other gormless word an expletive, talking about bitches and blow-jobs and easy birds. They will bring their world into your world and you will have to decide, in a terrifying instant, what to do.
Even if what you do is nothing.
You can get killed for saying something. Even a mild rebuke can get you the death sentence, effective immediately. Men die for speaking up.
But these lads are loud – too loud to be ignored. By you or your woman or your child. Do you want your kid to listen to this stuff? Or do you risk making him or her an orphan?
Yobs are so touchy these days, that’s the problem. Yobs are more sensitive than they have ever been in yob history. They react to the mildest rebuke with murderous rage. The average hoodie is thin-skinned beyond belief, his self-esteem so fragile that any criticism is almost guaranteed to explode into physical confrontation.
One thing is certain: reasoning with them does not work. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time – they don’t have one. If, when yobs swear, you tell them to turn down the volume, you’d better be prepared to go all the way.
Because they will be.
Context is everything. I don’t advocate going around telling every foul-mouthed moron to shut his filthy cakehole. It does not bother me at all if I am at a football match and the bloke in the seat behind me is shouting about ‘stupid cunts’. The stupid cunts at football matches don’t bother me. I don’t much care what anyone says if I am alone. But if I am out with my family and it happens – in a restaurant, in a park, in a hotel bar-then that’s different.
Nothing will get me to keep my mouth shut. And it is nothing to do with bravery. I just can’t accept foul-mouthed strangers entering my daughter’s world. And I am very happy to kick, gouge and claw while rolling in the dirt to make my point.
Stupid, really. I am not much good to my daughter if some psycho–chav buries his blade in my heart. And what a waste – to lose your life because you asked some pathetic piece of pond scum-and his mates, because they are invariably mob-hande – to watch his potty mouth.
But there is nothing rational about the flight-or-fight mechanism. It is not a debating society. It is not as though you carefully weigh the options and then go with one or the other. The moment you make your decision is here and gone before you know it.
And suddenly you are either bowing your craven head because safety is the wisest course of action, or you are confronting a group of leering teenagers-because sometimes the stupid thing is also the right thing.
And then you ask yourself: Can I take them? These leering strangers – will they put me in the A&E or the graveyard?
Almost certainly, all things considered, you can’t take them. They are younger than you, stronger than you, and you are the one who is flying solo. They are what the media call multiple assailants.
But what gets you through is that – if you are mad enough to say something in the first place-you are inevitably a lot angrier than they are.
You come out of nowhere, seething with rage, right in their faces – they haven’t been trying to offend your small child. You’re ready to rumble, full of that righteous, blood-pumping juice where you just don’t care what happens to you. And that might just be enough to make them back down and go away, despite their superior numbers.
If they don’t kill you, that is.
They killed young Kevin Johnson. He was twenty-two years old, at home in Sunderland with his seven-month-old baby son Chase trying to sleep in his cot. It was the early hours of the morning. And down on the street, right outside Kevin’s front door, a gang of lads was getting very loud. Kevin could have put the pillow over his head. He could have tried to soothe his son. He could have done nothing. That would have been the easiest thing to do. But Kevin went out into the street and told the gang-there were three of them-to keep the noise down. And they stabbed him to death. And Chase Johnson will grow up without a father because Kevin refused to take the soft, sensible option. Because Kevin Johnson was decent. Because Kevin Johnson was brave. Because Kevin Johnson wanted to protect his family. No doubt Chase will be proud of his father one day. And so he should be. Even if he will never remember him.
Entitlement – that’s the great curse of our age. Every scabby little yob thinks he has the right to do whatever he wants at whatever volume he wants. Nobody has any responsibility to the wider community. And that’s what it comes down to when you tell some foul-mouthed gang to cut it out. You are saying: I’m here too, I have rights too. A crazy thing to say in this day and age.
In Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger’s character Ennis is at a Fourth of July party with his wife and two small daughters when a couple of bikers start making a loud comparative study of ‘pussy’ in Montana and Wyoming.
‘Let’s move, Ennis, let’s just move,’ says his wife, Alma. But Ennis is a man not a mouse and he quietly and politely asks the two drunken bikers to ‘Keep it down – I got two little girls here.’
They don’t just ignore him. They start loudly speculating about the last time Ennis had sex with his missus. They provoke him. They goad him. They are unrepentant in their obscenities. They can’t get past the pussy. It’s pussy, pussy, pussy with these guys. And they tell him to listen to his wife: if he doesn’t like it, then go sit somewhere else.
Ennis goes wild. He kicks the first biker full in the face, knocking him out cold, and offers to put the other one’s teeth in his digestive system. The conscious biker backs away, dragging his bloodied pal with him.
And what makes the scene a work of genius is that Ennis’ wife and children are not grateful. Far from it.
They are all appalled at the violence that lurks inside this soft-spoken husband and devoted father. As several families pick up their blankets and move away – as if it is Ennis who poses a threat to civilisation, rather than the bikers – his children whimper and hide and his wife stares at him as if seeing him for the first time.
In my experience, that’s just what it is like.
When yobs swear, it is very easy to end up looking like the bad guy. It is very easy to find your wife and child staring at you as if they have suddenly realised that you are, in fact, a gay cowboy.
This is how it was. We were in a restaurant. At the next table were three teenage lads. They were probably not so different to me and my mates at that age – although I don’t recall sitting around in family restaurants in my teens. And they were discussing the sister of one of the lads. ‘A right little slag’, apparently. ‘She was ready to give him a jump!’ This was said while gesturing at one of the group – presumably not her brother, though you never know.
I listened to this stuff for, oh, about four minutes, or possibly six, as my wife pretended to study the menu and our small daughter crayoned in her My Little Pony workbook.
Then I told them to shut the fuck up.
And I told them that I was only going to give them one fucking warning. And – red-faced with rage, ludicrously holding a knife and fork in my hand, as though I might eat them alive – I pointed at my daughter and said that she wasn’t going to listen to this fucking stuff about how your fucking sister was ready to fuck anybody, for fuck’s sake.
They were scared. They shut up and ate their happy meals as quiet as mice. And I know they could have beaten the living shit out of me with absolutely no problem. I would have had no chance whatsoever against multiple assailants of their age and size. But here’s the thing: it mattered more to me than it did to them. And I really meant it. If they had told me to go fuck myself, I would have happily kicked them through the buffet bar. Or attempted to.
As soon as I told them to shut up, they were not the problem. The problem was my wife. She pointed out – later, when we were alone, when that miserable meal was over – that our daughter had been so busy colouring in the My Little Pony characters that she had not heard a word they had said about the slutty sister. But – so my wife insisted – our daughter had heard every profanity spat out by her psychotic father.
When yobs swear, you sort of hope that your family will love you more if you make a stand. You hope they will be grateful that you are the kind of man who does not just turn his butt cheeks and say, Go ahead, world, fuck me up the arse.
You think they might even be proud of you.
Not a bit of it. Like Alma, the wife in Brokeback Mountain, my own wife was horrified by the level of rage I had to summon up before I could say anything. My wife was as appalled as Heath Ledger’s missus in Brokeback Mountain. And I am not even having a secret affair with Jake Gyllenhaal.
But the truth is, we do not do it for them. The brutal fact of the matter is that – if we are one of the fools who dares to speak up – we are doing it almost exclusively for ourselves.
Our women – those pragmatic girlfriends, those hard-headed wives – think that ultimately it is not worth it. Risking your life for a random bout of inappropriate behaviour? That’s the madness of the macho man. I personally think that men like Kevin Johnson are modern-day heroes and we could use a million more just like him. But his son will miss his father every day of his life, and at some point he will have the right to ask, But was it worth it, Dad?
Fight or flight? These two disparate instincts have the same function: to save your hide. But sometimes doing nothing, while saving your life, robs you of your soul.
Ultimately, the only argument that matters is about the kind of man you want to be. And when did we stop being the kind of men who want to protect the people we love? When did that go out of style? When did wanting to protect your family become old-fashioned?
My old martial arts teacher had a wonderful recipe for dealing with trouble. ‘Walk away,’ he would tell me, after hundreds of hours spent teaching me to kick and punch and block. ‘Walk away.’
Yeah but no but, I would say to him. But he had heard it all before, and he believed that none of it was worth killing or dying for. Someone spills your drink? Walk away. Someone bumps into you? Walk away. And it’s true – most trouble you can just walk away from. You can smile. You can apologise. You can put the pillow over your head.
But there comes a point when walking away means that you will think yourself less of a man. For most of us, that moment comes when some careless stranger is far too close to our women and our children. And I don’t walk away from that – whatever the wife wants. That’s where I stand and I draw the line and I get ready to roll around on the floor of the restaurant.
I don’t want any trouble. Honestly. Really. But it’s just like Ennis says in Brokeback Mountain:
‘You need to shut your slop-bucket mouths – you hear me?’
Three Dying Parents (#ulink_ecb3f2e0-8de6-5674-9e07-d446903dd7b8)
If you only see two dead bodies in your life, then make sure they are your parents.
The death of a mother or father cannot be grasped from a distance. The phone call, the sealed coffin – it’s not enough to comprehend that kind of loss – that twice-in-a-lifetime loss.
Inevitable it may be, but the death of a parent has an unimaginable quality to it. You need to see for yourself that they are truly gone, to understand that the ones who brought you into this world have gone from this world. So go look at the body. That is not the end of losing your father or mother. But that is where it begins.
Even as the numbing bureaucracy of death clamours for your attention – the funeral arrangements, deciding what to do with the leftovers of a lifetime, the surreal task of choosing a coffin-would Dad like the simple pine number, or the Napoleon job with the brass handles? – you have to force yourself to go and see.
To the hospital. To the undertaker’s back room. Or – if they died at home, as my mother did – then to the master bedroom of the house where you grew up.
It helps. More than this, it is necessary. Yet viewing the dead body of a parent is a curiously flat experience. You feel it should be charged with emotion. There should be hot tears, and some final embrace, and Katherine Jenkins singing, ‘Time to Say Goodbye’.
But the emotion comes earlier – in the cancer ward, in the hospital café, sitting by the death bed drinking endless cups of bad tea – and it comes later – at the funeral, or when you go through dusty cupboards, and your dead dad’s clothes, or your mother’s heartbreaking jewellery, or their photograph albums, and it takes you many strange hours to realise the obvious.
Everything must go.
Those are the moments for the spikes of emotion. But when you summon up the nerve to gaze upon your dead parent-as you have to, as you must – you hardly recognise them. You even feel a bit cheated. Mum? Dad? Where are you?
And it is not because the undertaker has weaved his crafty embalming magic, or that a mouth is set in a line that you never saw in life. It is simply because the spark has flown. The thing that made that woman your mother, or made that man your father, has gone forever. And you don’t know if they have gone to a better place, or into black oblivion.
But that is not he. And that is not she.
You must look at the face of your dead parent not because it gives you a chance to say some last farewell but because until you do you will never even begin to understand that they are dead, and that you are alone in this world as you have never been alone before.
And even then it is hard. Even then it is next to impossible. Last month my mother had been gone for ten years. Ten years since the cancer overwhelmed her. Ten years since I returned to my home from her home to search for a hospice, leaving her in the care of an elderly friend, an ex-nurse – lovely Nelly, now gone herself-and got the call in the middle of the night to say come as fast you can. And it still wasn’t fast enough. Ten years dead – and yet, here’s the funny thing: I recently tried to call her.
I actually reached for the phone to relate some news that I knew would make her smile, and then I stopped myself, thinking – mental or what?
I got there not long after she died, and kissed her face, and saw an expression on that face that I had never seen when she lived, and yet it is still hard to believe.
Yet here is what you learn. There are two ways for your parents to die – quickly and slowly.
They go quick. They go slow.
But they go.
My dad was quick. My mum was slow.
