One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo

by Darrel Bristow-Bovey

  According to this, when you were ten, a year was 10 per cent of your life experience, so it felt like a long time, but when you’re forty a year is only 2.5 per cent, so it feels four times shorter.

  I reject this explanation, and not just because it involves maths. By this logic, those blokes finishing the Comrades should have more and more fun as the race goes on. The first kilometre should have seemed like the longest because it was 100 per cent of their experienced misery, and the last kilometre should feel – what? – ninety times shorter? (I’ve never run the Comrades but I have flown long-distance in economy class, which is more or less the same thing.)

  2. “It’s not time speeding up, it’s you slowing down”

  According to this piece of slander, time always passes at the same speed but our mental processes are winding down, so it seems faster out there. According to this we’re like a Cape Town driver on a Joburg freeway: everything’s a blur and we’ve changed lanes before we’ve had time to indicate and everyone is hooting and waving their fists at us. “Yikes!” we yell. “Everyone drives so fast here!” When actually everyone is driving normally and it’s we who are the slowpokes and dullards.

  The problem with this is that it assumes some high point of mental acuity when we were young. When I look back at the cretin who lurched through the world in my skin twenty years ago, I don’t see some grandmaster mental athlete with lightning synapses. That guy was a dolt. I wouldn’t trust him to operate a Chelsea bun without making a mess of his life. I’m not saying I’ve turned into Professor Cranium since then, but it’s not humanly possible to have become more dumb. There are used elastoplasts clinging to innercity bicycle tyres that are smarter than that numbskull.

  3. “Diminishing stimuli”

  According to this, when we’re young we’re constantly learning things and taking in new stimuli. Learning is like fibre in our diet: it slows things down while we digest it. As we get older we stop learning new things, so it all becomes a big milkshakey smoosh of refined carbs and empty calories, and time flows by like a doughnut smoothie.

  Right. As though we can avoid learning new things. The older you get nowadays, the more everything is new. I’d only just mastered programming my DVD player when PVRs came round, and just the other day someone gave me a flash drive, if that’s the correct word, with a pre-streamed and downloaded TV series, if any of that makes sense to you, and I spent an hour trying to figure out where to plug it in on my TV. (The answer: it plugs into that place on a TV that you’ll find on a TV that comes with a place where you can plug it in, i.e. someone else’s TV.)

  The world comes up with more new things every day: Mars rovers, Cloud devices, weather patterns, God particles, new bits of technology with the letter i- in front of it, transgender politics, predictive algorithms, SnapChat … I don’t even know what Candy Crush is yet. The ageing process in the modern world is one long Rimbaud-like derangement of the senses, a kind of dreamt, half-panicky madness where you’re constantly trying to unravel too much new information and learn new ways of using it. When it comes to stimuli, middle age is the new five years old.

  *

  While I was writing this, my partner read some of it over my shoulder, which is something I wish she wouldn’t do, but there’s no sense starting a fight when I’m hoping she’ll make some lunch.

  “So what is the reason that time speeds up, then?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do I look like a neurochronologist?” Which may sound snappish to you, but bear in mind I hadn’t had much breakfast.

  “So you’re just shooting down other people’s theories, and you have none of your own?”

  “Didn’t you read the bit about the Bond villain?” I demanded. “Or the electromagnetic singularity? And by the way – a doughnut smoothie actually sounds like a pretty good idea, doesn’t it?”

  She nodded thoughtfully and went downstairs, hopefully to where the lunch is kept.

  “Stop reading over my shoulder!” I yelled in a whisper.

  But she’s right. The months and years fly by and I don’t know why, and it all started when I was twenty-nine.

  I would soon be thirty and what had I done? Nothing, compared to other people who did things before thirty. I tried keeping a journal, to slow things down. The idea is each day you write down what happened during the day, no matter how boring, or actually especially if it’s boring. That way the days won’t slip down like a delicious crispy, cinnamony smoothie – they’ll be all fibrous and you’ll have to chew them over. You’ll have the sense of living through them twice. Plus, with a journal, I won’t have this sense of being here and not knowing how it happened. I’ll be able to riffle through the pages and find my tracks across the sand. Even if I’m not anywhere, at least I’ll know how I got there.

  It worked for a while, but the problem with keeping a journal is you have to be disciplined, and if I was a disciplined person, I wouldn’t need to keep a journal. The first part of every journal session was spent frozen in a thinking position in front of the journal, trying to remember what had happened since last I’d remembered to write. Hmm, let me go back and read what I wrote last time, maybe that will help jog my memory … let’s see … “Must remember to write in the journal every day.” That’s not very helpful. “Was walking down the street today when a Coke bottle fell on my head from a low-flying aeroplane.” I don’t remember that. “Snuck on board the Titanic and fell in love with a chubby girl and painted her naked. Later the ship sank.” Wait a second, I’m just making things up from movies. “If you’re reading this in the future, I have travelled back through time to warn you that you’re in great danger.” Now I’m just messing with myself.

  Anyway, no amount of calling it a “journal”, or a “secret code book” or “Captain’s log” can conceal that what you’re doing is writing a diary. You’re just Bridget Jones with bigger underpants.

  I drew up a List of Things To Do Before I Die. If I’d reached twenty-nine so fast, I’d obviously be sixty-five by breakfast tomorrow, and if I didn’t have a list, nothing would be done. I believe in lists. Nothing has ever been done that’s not on a list.

  Noah’s list:

  Build ark

  Get herbivores

  Get carnivores

  Build partitions in ark

  Get more herbivores

  If it goes on the list, it’s only a matter of time before it’s accomplished and then grandly crossed off in koki pen. Either that, or it will stay there until it’s too late and doesn’t matter any more, and then it will silently drop off the list like one of Stalin’s rivals. Either way, it’s a win.

  Examples of items that get typically get crossed off:

  Get haircut

  Have lunch

  Write email explaining why book is late

  Examples of items that typically linger till they drop off the bottom:

  Fix leaky roof before the end of the rainy season

  Do tax

  Write book

  When I started the List of Things To Do Before I Die, it wasn’t called that. It was called the List of Things To Do Before I’m Forty. That seemed far enough away, so I could have some breathing room before going out to:

  Spend a night with only a torch and a sleeping bag in the ruins of Dracula’s castle

  Win the Booker Prize twice

  Visit the grave of Ernest Shackleton on South Georgia Island

  Swim across the Dardanelles

  Weigh 80 kilograms

  See a coelacanth in the wild

  Dive in the open ocean with man-eating sharks

  I bought a spiral-bound 100-page A5 Croxley Student Notebook to hold the list as it expanded, and as I flip through it now, I can report that the list has climbed to seventy items. Number 70, most recent, is to walk among the Mountains of the Moon, which I suppose isn’t terribly likely, given that the Mountains of the Moon are a legend and don’t actually exist. Still, “likely” is a relative term on a list that includes “Set
free a turtle” and “Search for the Loch Ness Monster, minimum two weeks’ duration”.

  Each time I achieve one I cross it out and write the date next to it. Not to boast, but this has happened three times already, and if I carry on at this rate I will definitely work my way through my list before I die, provided I die in 2334.

  Just having the list is calming. Writing things is almost as good as doing things – in fact, in some ways it’s better than doing because you don’t have to make all those phone calls.

  *

  I had my thirtieth birthday in the gentleman’s bar of the old Rosebank Hotel. It was a fine old place, empty as a bottle, so dimly lit it was like drinking in the boot of a car. There was never any music and it had a circular bar in the middle where Leon the Barman lurked like an Easter Island stone carving, polishing glasses. Leon was a lugubrious dude but he made the best martinis in the world, using only Gordon’s gin, ice and what seemed like too much vermouth till you tasted it. He had the subtle hands of a conjurer and I suspected him of palming something into the shaker, but these were the days before video cameras in cellphones so it was hard to prove.

  I wasn’t sure anyone would come so I didn’t tell Leon it was happening. I cut my hair for the occasion and put on a dark suit. I wore proper shoes and had them polished. If I was going to turn thirty alone in a bar, by god, it wouldn’t be in sneakers.

  People did come. At midnight Leon, who had been shaking martinis for five hours like an arthritic maraca-player, shouted at everyone to go home and never come back and I thought, “Well, it’s all over now. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and I’ll be thirty and everything will be different.”

  The next morning I woke up, just as predicted. To delay the awful moment of confronting myself, I decided to open my birthday presents. I would open them and take inventory and then I’d sit down and write thank-you letters, because I am thirty now, and a man of thirty doesn’t wait a month before writing his thank-you letters.

  There were the usual bunch of novelty gifts you’d expect from the lame-asses and detrimentals you hang around with when you’re twenty-nine. There were bottles of fig-based laxatives (Dear Chunko, what a thoughtful gift), a pink plastic artificial vagina (Dear Rob, do send my best regards to your mom) and someone gave me three silkworms in a perforated shoebox which they’d gift-wrapped, somewhat nullifying the perforations. (Dear Rachel, thank you for the dead worms). Then there was a pair of white pyjamas.

  They were soft, light, summery cotton, with attractive large mother-of-pearl buttons. You could imagine padding through your house and onto your broad veranda in such pyjamas, greeting the postman while the golden sun rises over your rose garden. You could open your correspondence in pyjamas like that, then idly compose an urbane ditty on the piano. I hope you don’t think I’m overselling these pyjamas, because in fact I hated them on sight.

  I hadn’t worn pyjamas since I was ten years old. The only adults I’d ever seen in jammies were my grandfather and Mr Snyckers from our church who sometimes went walking up the road with a colander on his head to see if the Germans had invaded. Who would be so snide as to give me a pair of jimjams for my thirtieth birthday? What secret enemy, what smiling foe, what skulking frenemy? I’m only thirty and thirty is the new twenty, and I don’t need pyjamas yet! What next? Slippers?

  I threw the jarmies from me in a righteous rage, and that’s when I realised: the throw was good! My joints still swung on their hinges! My teeth didn’t crumble when I clacked them together! The old structure must be still sound. I hardly even had a hangover. Nothing had changed! I was still me, just thirty, and thirty didn’t even sound that old any more. I’d been rolling it around my mouth so long I’d grown accustomed to the taste.

  Age is obviously a myth, a boogeyman that grown-ups use to frighten us. I was scared of it when I was twenty-nine, but now I’m a man and I’m no longer afraid of childish things. I haven’t grown old and therefore I will not grow old. An exception will be made for me! Something will happen! Yes! How could I not have realised this all along? Age is just a suggestion, like a parking ticket: if you ignore it, it will go away.

  And then not very long ago I found myself in an idle moment going through some drawers and rooting through boxes and wondering what’s inside those packets, and it so happened that I came upon a pair of old, white, folded cotton pyjamas.

  They were still in good condition, which you’d expect because they had never been worn. Out of curiosity, I tried them on. Not bad. Perhaps a little snug, but oh my, so soft and cottony. These would be so pleasant to wear while opening my correspondence on a sunny morning …

  And it’s then, sitting in your pyjamas, thinking how cosy it would be if you had a pair of slippers, that you realise you’re thirty-nine years old and your girlfriend is telling you it’s time to see a doctor.

  4

  The Five Stages of Turning Forty

  1. DENIAL

  I decided to go shopping for clothes. This surprised my partner.

  “What’s so surprising about a man getting new duds?” I demanded, a little defensively.

  “When was the last time you bought new, er, duds?” she asked.

  I saw what she was driving at. My natural thriftiness plus an aversion to the parts of a mall that aren’t the food court means I generally strive to get the most from the clothing I already have. My jeans are like the tripartite alliance or one of those ’58 Chevy Impalas that drive around Havana held together by duct tape and Venezuelan chewing gum and silent Spanish prayers. I still wear a Mighty Thor T-shirt a girlfriend gave me in 1992. On chilly days round the house I wear a blue woollen jersey that I had when I was sixteen years old. I dress like someone who was abducted from his family home twenty years ago and has only just escaped: you could identify me from the “last seen wearing” posters.

  In the time we’d been together my partner had only seen me acquire one new wearable item – a pair of waterproof walking boots that I bought mainly so that I could take them home and submerge them in fifteen centimetres of bathwater to test their waterproofness. To introduce the scientific element, I placed a Disprin in the toe of each boot to check for seepage. I’m pleased to report that when I accidentally knocked over the left boot and it filled up like the front half of the Titanic, I could lift the fizzing bathwater-and-Disprin cocktail clean out of the tub without any of it sweating through the seams. You could smuggle goldfish in those boots; they’d keep your feet dry while you swim the English Channel. Mind you, I still haven’t ever worn them because I don’t have clothes made out of those boots, so when it rains I still stay indoors.

  We went shopping and I found a shirt. Really it found me, the way a giant spider might find you if you were a small forest deer.

  “What do you think of this?” I asked.

  “It’s quite colourful,” she said cautiously.

  “I know, right? It’s time to be more adventurous.”

  “But is it time to attract bees?”

  “I can pull it off, though, right?”

  “I think pulling it off would be better than putting it on.”

  “Excellent.”

  It had been such a long time since I’d used a changing room in a clothing store I’d forgotten what to do. Everyone knows you have to try on clothes with your eyes shut or a long black cloth draped over the glass. That’s why vampires are always well dressed: they’re not afraid of seeing themselves in department store mirrors. But I am not a vampire; I was in the mirror.

  I stood there half-naked, mouth hanging open in horror.

  Of course I knew it was there. I catch occasional glimpses of myself in restaurant cutlery and in the windows of passing cars, but I can always shut my eyes or look away. Home is a controlled environment, so I can avoid extended exposure, but in a booth the size of a coffin, lit like a soap opera, there’s nowhere to hide.

  There it was, heaving and rolling and bizarrely proud, like a new island made of yoghurt breaking the surface of the sea: the Bovey Belly.
My father had it and my brother has it too, and so do his sons. My grandfather must have brought it on the ship to Africa a hundred years ago, smuggled under his shirt like a biological weapon. It comes to all the Bristow-Bovey men in their late thirties – we’re skinny youths, then normal-sized men, and then suddenly one night the body clock ticks past a certain point, pre-programmed like a booby-trap to punish us for living too long. A switch is tripped; the belly awakes.

  I took off the rest of my clothes. If you’re going to peer into the abyss, you may as well get a good gander.

  It was worse than I could have imagined.

  The belly was too big to be contained; it was escaping to my hips. While I ballooned around the middle like a man smuggling cottage cheese in a bodysuit of Glad wrap, everywhere else seemed to be getting smaller. The legs: spindly. The shoulders: could pass through the eye of a needle. The chest: slipping, as though sculpted from mashed potatoes. A bulging balloon animal looked back at me in the glass.

  This is all we are: meat in a changing-room mirror. There’s nothing but biology: all the fuss about personality and free will and environment is just so much hoohah and flapdoodle to give you something to do while you’re growing up. You think you’re using cunning and strategy to play the hand you’re dealt, but one day you stand before a department store mirror and all the cards get turned over and you realise the only one you’re bluffing is yourself.

  But you know what? The hell with it. There’s something else I inherited from my father: sheer mulish bloody-mindedness.

  I came out in the new shirt.

  “What do you think?”

  My partner stared. “Um,” she said.

  “It’s cool, right?”

  “It’s, uh … is that a small?”

  “No, it’s a medium.”

  “Mmm. Well, you know, some labels, their mediums are really more like smalls, so …”

  “No, but I’m a medium, so this is my size.”

  “Yeah. It’s just that, uh … you know, in Asia the men there have smaller bones, so … is that even a man’s shirt?”