Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast. Tony Parsons
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is not to suggest that these things can always be done without pain and tears. That Latvian lap dancer might leave you, or you might wrap your motorbike around a lamppost, or your Diesel Viker straight-leg jeans may be a sartorial disaster-mine were-but, compared to the poisoned chalice of youth, this is all just a pint of mild and bitter.
Unless a man has led an extraordinarily sheltered life, the so-called crisis of his middle years-whatever form it takes-will be nothing much compared to the crisis he faced down in young manhood.
I look back at my youth and I see … turmoil.
Drugs. Women. Fights. Drink. Ice cubes made from the tears of the broken-hearted. Often all in one lunch break.
And I remember friends dying. Not from the cancer and treacherous tickers that stalk us later in the unrelenting cycle of life but in all the raw violence of youth.
Dead in car crashes. Dead from drugs. My friend Johnny Thunders died in a New Orleans hotel at the age of thirty-eight-just when he should have been preparing for one of those mid-life clichés. If Johnny had lived, would he really have experienced a mid-life crisis? Would he have fretted about needing a size bigger in leather trousers, or why heroin didn’t taste as good as it used to?
Whatever the middle years had in store for Johnny Thunders, it would have seemed pretty tame compared to the screaming insanity of what came before.
And hardly a crisis at all.
So it is for all of us. Youth is never a stroll in the park. It is almost always harder than what waits down the line. It is sad-tragic even-when a marriage breaks up, or when your hairline is receding faster than your career, or when love grows cold and beyond recall. But look on the bright side: is it really tougher than what you endured in your teens and twenties? Wanting a new car, or a new woman, or a new way of living- is it really such a crisis?
I would suggest not.
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