One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

Author:Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: If you don’t choose your midlife crisis, your crisis will choose you.
ISBN: 978-1-77022-747-7
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2014-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

5

Don Quixote

If you don’t choose your midlife crisis, your midlife crisis will choose you.

The midlife crisis was invented in 1965 by Elliott Jaques, some say, or by Erik H. Erikson, others say, which probably brings on a bit of a crisis for whichever of them is the actual guy. Erik or Elliott suggested it could start any time under the age of sixty, but a more recent UK study reported in the Guardian and The Times, although that doesn’t make it true, pins the average age at forty-three for men and forty-four for women.

(Recently some mooching kids in America have started trying to claim a quarter-life crisis. Quarter-life crisis! The nerve! Is there nothing this rotten generation won’t try hijack to make it all about them? Get in line, you little creeps, we were here first.)

I sat with my partner one Saturday morning after the visit to the doctor, drinking coffee at a sidewalk café.

“You need to do something about your midlife crisis,” she said.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I won’t buy a sports car or anything.”

“It doesn’t just go away. If you leave this long enough, it’ll just get worse.”

She had a point. If a midlife crisis is anything, it’s a reaction to the anxious realisation of how late it is, and how unprepared you are. The longer you ignore the anxiety and pretend it isn’t happening, the worse the reaction becomes. People often laugh at men having midlife crises because they suddenly up and do something comical: hair transplants; calf implants; moving to Montague to run a worm farm; stocking up on body paint and MDMA and going to Afrika-Burn to offer free foot massages to hippy girls. It’s funny till it turns sad. Women do things too, but men have it worse because they ignore things for longer and then do things without knowing why. I don’t know why that is, but I’m guessing testosterone is involved. Whenever there’s a spectacular display of human dumbassery, you can bet there’ll be some testosterone somewhere at the bottom of it.

When the crisis comes, my partner and I agreed, you have to do something about it, and it matters what you do.

We watched a peloton of middle-aged cyclists go by like a skein of dehydrated geese.

“Should I take up cycling?” I said reluctantly. “I could train for the Argus or something.”

It’s not an original idea. Every old bloke I know is on a bike nowadays, whirling their scrawny legs and zipped-up bellies around the bitter streets, balanced on narrow plastic items more like medical instruments than seats, heads helmeted like the tip of some bulbous alien penis. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by cycling, starving themselves on energy gel, dragging themselves through the chilly streets at dawn, looking for a place to take a selfie. I’ll say this for them – they do seem to lose weight. If you’ve always wanted to look more like Sarah Jessica Parker, cycling’s definitely the sport for you.

It’s not for me, though.

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