Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

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.