Out of Time

I look down at the chessboard and see that my hot-headed, non-strategic play has meant that I have lost some vital pieces: a bishop, both rooks, a knight, several pawns. Where did they go? How could I have discarded them so unthinkingly? My armoury is diminished. Moves have taken place that I didn’t even notice, and now my position is weak.

I can see that it’s going to be tough to get anything at all out of this particular match. I’ve played it too casually. I’ve played it all wrong.

I say, with a smile: ‘Perhaps I could start again?’

And someone – my opponent, my conscience, God – answers me, in a voice that’s quiet and calm, but that fills the room, makes my ears ring, my stomach shudder: ‘No. This is the game.’

This is the game.

So I did the only thing I could think of that didn’t involve running away: I wrote about how I was. The fact of being over halfway through my life, and the feelings that fact created. The Observer ran the article I wrote, accompanied by a photograph of me, in a lot of make-up, looking younger than I usually do. This was very kind, though not so useful for the piece.

The article’s title was ‘Is This It?’ And it was, I suppose. Except I couldn’t seem to shake off the uncomfortable feeling, the anxiety itch.

I was still in the grips of my teeny tiny crise d’un certain age (French = more exciting), and it still didn’t show. No alarms and no surprises. I yearned for my desperation to become more flamboyant; I was like the child with stomach-ache who wants a bruise, a plaster, an ambulance rush to A&E. Nothing occurred.

It was pathetic. Who was I kidding? I didn’t pack my bag anywhere except in my head. I couldn’t leave, and a quiet crisis seems, to everyone outside it, like no crisis at all. Why couldn’t I turn my panic into flight – abandon my home, even for a few months – to have a true middle-aged catastrophe? Why didn’t I shag a builder, or a bendy yoga dullard? Why wasn’t I taking a long, solo hike across an unfamiliar landscape, pausing only to meet authentic people who would tell me the meaning of life?

I talked to S about this. I said: ‘Would you mind if I staged a midlife drama, if I left you and wandered around a bit for a couple of months?’

He said: ‘Not a bother. As long as you take the kids.’

On the radio, I heard a writer talking. There was a five-part series of his musings, inspired by the lengthy hikes he takes across cities. An imposing man, he mostly walks at night. I quite fancied this, but it’s a different prospect, going for solo rambles in the early hours when you’re a shortish woman. I thought about cycling, or going for 3 a.m. drives, but both seemed pointless – plus slowing down to talk to a pedestrian when you’re in a car at night could easily give the wrong impression. Also, I still had the days to get through, sorting the kids and earning a living; and S was going away for work, so – babysitting bills.

Still. As a result of the ‘Is This It?’ article, I got a deal from a publisher to write a book about midlife. A book. This book. And I tried to write it. God, I tried. I would bundle P to school and F to the child-minder, and then I would go to the kitchen and sit in front of my laptop, and put my coffee next to it to the right and my phone (switched to silent) to the left; and I would try to write. But the words didn’t come easy, and I had to earn a living, so I would put the book aside and go back to journalism. The quick turnaround kept me busy.

It might have been the head-mush you get when your children are small. Or denial, I suppose. But for some reason, I didn’t seem to be able to approach middle age face on. I couldn’t see it clearly. The panic was there, the Fear, the feelings. I knew how to write about them. But the fundamental crisis seemed to be happening off-camera, just out of sight, weaving itself in and around my everyday life without ever becoming distinct.

For a while, instead of writing, I talked to people. I tried to separate the personal from the more universal. Some of what I was churned up about seemed only to do with me, and some of it was timeless, a classic midlife shock and recalibration, and some of it was hooked into the time I was in, where we all were right now.

There is an element of middle age that is the same for anyone who thinks about it. Not just the death maths, but how the death maths affects your idea of yourself. Your potency and potential. Your thrusting, optimistic, silly dreams, such as they are. As they were … They’ve been forced to disappear. Suddenly, you’ve reached the age where you know you won’t ever play for your favourite football team. Or own a house with a glass box on the back. Or write a book that will change the world.

More prosaically, you can’t progress in your job: your bosses are looking to people in their twenties and thirties because younger workers don’t cost so much or – and this is the punch in the gut – they’re better at the job than you are. Maybe you would like to give up work but you can’t, because your family relies on your income, so you spend your precious, dwindling time, all the days and weeks and months of it, doing something you completely hate. Or you sink your savings into a long-nurtured idea and you watch it flounder and fail. Or your marriage turns strange. You don’t understand each other any more.

In short, you wake one day and everything is wrong. You thought you would be somewhere else, someone else. You look at your life and it’s as unfamiliar to you as the life of an eighteenth-century Ghanaian prince. It’s as though you went out one warm evening – an evening fizzing with delicious potential, so ripe and sticky-sweet you can taste it on the air – you went out on that evening for just one drink … and woke up two days later in a skip. Except you’re not in a skip, you’re in an estate car, on the way to an out-of-town shopping mall to buy a balance bike, a roof rack and some stackable storage boxes.

‘It’s all a mistake!’ you shout. ‘I shouldn’t be here! This life was meant for someone else! Someone who would like it! Someone who would know what to do!’

You see it all clearly now. You blink your eyes, look at your world, at your gut, your ugly feet in their awful shoes and think: I’ve done it all wrong.

I joined internet forums about midlife crisis where men – it was mostly men – lamented their mistakes.

‘I could have done more, been more successful, been a better person,’ said one. ‘I used to be someone but now I’m just part of the crowd.’

‘Maybe,’ said another, ‘I should just resign myself to the fact that I’m not what I used to be. But, see, this is my problem, I can’t …’

Women talked too. A friend’s Facebook status: ‘… the slow realization over the past year that I’ve messed it up. I’ve had a crap start in life and I went on to make a series of poor decisions, so now I’ve made my bed, I’ve got to lie in it. I could be so much more than a fat, grey, toothless, 44-year-old harpy living in a fucking council house with one child who despises me, another who will never live independently, and a marriage that will forever be in recovery … I know it’s up to me to change things. What’s not entirely clear is how to choose the right path. Because I don’t know where I’m going …’

I spoke to a friend who said: ‘I wonder if we messed it up for ourselves, having such a good time when we were young.’

We are each of our age. We share a culture, whether The Clangers, or Withnail, or ‘Voodoo Ray’. Our heroes are communal, our references the same. Everyone has their own story, but it’s shaped by the time in which it’s told.

I’ve always enjoyed being part of something bigger. In the late 80s, I believed in rave and the power of the collective. Even now I like crowds, especially when music is playing; I love gigs, clubbing, festivals, marches, football matches, firework displays. I’m not mad about the hassle of getting to those places, but once I’m there, I’m fully in. As long as it isn’t too mediated, so that you can feel in and of an experience or an audience, so you are there, singly, but also consumed within a whole other entity, the crowd. The crowd has its own emotions, its own rhythm.

It’s good to lose yourself in that. I find it comforting to feel as others do, to share a moment; to know that I’m unique, but not that special. I like to know that what I’m going through, while personal to me, is also part of a pattern.

I thought about the 90s. I was very social. Always out, usually with other people. Most of my twenties took place then, in that time when youth was celebrated, where youth culture came in from the side, where the mainstream was altered by the upstart outsiders. And we – me, my friends, the crowd of us all – felt the rush of it, the need for speed. There was an up-and-out head-fuck that we searched for, constantly. Was that still within us, even now? That weird hyperactivity, the hunt for the high, a hatred of slowing up? A desire to escape the mundane, to be busy and crazed with endorphins. Even now?

In the 90s, drugs were involved in this, of course, and I thought about the people I know who have continued their hedonism into their forties. There were others who waited until middle age to start what used to be called dabbling. Others had given up everything – no booze, no drugs – but seemed driven to find other highs, through exercise: running, cycling, triathlons. Or they turned their drug obsessiveness into a new delight in food. Tracking down the most exclusive, carefully sourced ingredients from an expert, then taking such trouble over the preparation and timing that the moment of ingestion dominated their whole week … I noticed that all the new gadgets had names like ecstasy tablets. The Spiralizer. The Thermomix. The Mirage. The Nutribullet, made by a company called the Magic Bullet.

If you were young in the 90s, how does that affect your middle age?

I tried to think about this as I got up in the mornings, laid the table, helped small limbs in and out of uniforms, checked homework. S was away a lot, at this time, and I was alone with the kids. That was okay. Once you’ve had a child, and that child goes to nursery, or school, or a child-minder, you become plugged into a system. I had numbers to call, in case my arrangements fell through. And F was still little. Until she started crawling, I took her to meetings, showed her off like a new handbag. She was a good distractor.

My thoughts came and went. They mostly turned into questions.

Music was one, of course. I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t believe in music, in what it can do. I’m of a generation that knows that music can save your life, give your life meaning, express the inexpressible, alter your course. People came into nightclubs while on a train track to normality and left believing they could be anything they liked. Their minds were opened up to a different way of living, a new way to work. They rejected the norm, the factory job, the lawyer training. Freelance creativity was their way out.

But what does music mean when you’re older? How does freelance feel when you’ve reached your forties, when you’re in a position where other people – your children – are relying on your work being stable, on the regular pay cheque that comes in every month? The internet had changed most of the creative jobs: journalism, media, photography, books, film-making, acting, fashion, comedy, music. There were fewer jobs and they paid less. All the work that seemed like an escape when we were young wasn’t proving to be so now.

Music, creativity, community, getting out of it. These were more than the habits of a generation: they were – they are – our touchstones. They had been how we got through life, what we had used to help us negotiate its pitfalls and terrors. It could be that part of my midlife angst was concerned with whether the old ways – our old beliefs – were effective any more. And what I could do if they weren’t having the same effect. If they don’t work, if they make it worse, then what?

In Bristol I gave a talk at a Festival of Ideas. I wasn’t sure I had any ideas worth festivalizing, but as what I’d been thinking about was midlife, I talked about that. I brought up death maths, and expensive bikes, drinking too much, and mourning the rush, and middle-aged sex lives. I made jokes about spiralizers.

Afterwards, there were questions from the audience. One man in his early 40s put his hand up and said, ‘I still feel 22.’ (‘Feelings aren’t facts!’ I didn’t say.) He had recently bought a skateboard. He didn’t know whether to learn skateboarding or hammer the skateboard to the wall, as a decoration.

How can we make our minds, which insist that we’re still 22, match up with our bodies, which are twice that age? How do we get rid of the sense of having missed out? How can we stop worrying about looking silly, because of our age? What should we do with our old MA1 jackets, or 12-inch remixes, or twisted Levi’s jeans? Does it matter if we don’t like new pop music? Is it okay to go to all-nighters if we go with our kids? What if we haven’t had kids?

I did my best with the questions. But I hadn’t studied mindfulness or sociology. I’m not a self-help guru. I can never tell if a new moisturizer makes any difference at all to my wrinkles. I was uncertain about many things, including time and consciousness and whether my mood (which was upbeat) was due to the warmth of the hall or the peri-menopause.

I wondered, what is an adult? We stretch our youth so far, so tight. We pull it up over our ageing bodies, like a pair of Lycra tights. We all do it to a certain extent, and yet we’re cruel to those who seem to hold on too hard for too long. We laugh about MAMILS (middle-aged men in Lycra) and cougars (middle-aged women sleeping with younger men). We mock women who have Botox and surgery, even as we urge them to stay as young-looking as they can. We giggle at dad-dancing, post up patronizing ‘Go on, my son!’ clips of grey-haired ravers on Facebook.

But it’s double standards. Because didn’t we, in our hearts, believe that youth is better than middle age? I think we did. I think we do. And our youthful ideals were clashing with our ideas of adulthood. There was a fight going on, inside and out. We take our children to festivals and get more trashed than they do.

‘What do you do in nightclubs?’ asked P. ‘I know you dance, but how long for? Can you choose the music? Why does everyone drink alcohol if it makes them ill?’

P once had a severe dancing-and-sugar comedown after a wedding. He danced for hours, fuelled on Coca-Cola and sweets. In the morning, he woke, white as a sheet, was sick, and had to go back to bed. He actually said, ‘I’m never doing that again, Mum. Never.’ His hangover was textbook, even though he didn’t drink.

I was great in nightclubs, but what did that qualify me for now? Could I continue with what I did – writing about popular culture, especially music – now that I was twice the age of those I talk to? A music writer. A critic. These jobs are as old-fashioned as being a miner, and as destined for redundancy. That’s a proper hangover.

Anyway, weren’t clubs partly about fancying people? I seemed to have a shifting sense of who I am. If you’re settled in a relationship, what does that mean? How does middle age affect your idea of love, of sex, of faithfulness? What about money? Not only did I know many people who earned a lot more than me, money, in general, seemed to have changed its meaning.

And what of the shallower stuff? How I looked. What my body could do, how it worked. My blood still pumped, I still bled. Did my body bleed as it used to?

Gradually, gradually, in between the bubbling, same-old rigmarole of everyday life, I came up with a plan. I would look back for a short time. (What’s the phrase? ‘Looking back is fine but it’s rude to stare.’) I would look back quickly, just long enough to investigate my prejudices and assumptions about adulthood. I would recall my twenties, check in on my thirties. There would be no beating myself up about wrong decisions, I would merely tell the tale. And then, I would arrive at my forties and I would look at that. At this middle decade, between the old age of youth and the youth of old age.

I would think about what I looked like. What my body can do. What marriage means, what happens when it changes over time. Work, and how our 90s’ assumptions might affect how we work now. Money. Money, which leads to jealousy. Anger, and patience, how they grow or die.

How children impact on your life in the everyday. Not the love – the love is assumed, we know the love – but what having children means for those who care for them, the routine of them, the stability. Parents. Family.

And death, I suppose. Time. The time left.

If I couldn’t tie these subjects down, catch them, skewer them with a ready pin for labelling and exhibition, then at least I could watch them fly. I could marvel at their existence. I might even see them settle (from the corner of my eye), and then I might glimpse their colours.

2. Adult-ish

January is always a bastard. Not only because it’s January, but because it’s my birthday, on the 7th. Exactly one week after New Year’s Eve, two weeks after Christmas Eve, when nobody wants to go out, or drink alcohol, or spend money, or see anyone they know well ever again, other than to tell them precisely what they think of them and their crappy idea of a gift or a joke or a long-term partner. S has used up all his present ideas for me over Christmas. And even if I do celebrate my birthday, the next day when I wake up, guess what? It’s still January.

But, you know, the kids love a birthday. They love giggling outside our bedroom door and then sneaking up to the bed with all the noiseless subtlety of piglets in mining boots. They love nudging each other – ‘You go, go on, one, two, three’ – before shouting, ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MUM,’ and singing the birthday song and its coda: ‘How old are you now? How old are you now? How old are you NO-OW? How old are you now?’ They know the answer. Those birthday bumps would break your back.

Downstairs, on the kitchen table, my array of presents is minimalist. A card from my mum. A printout of a photo of the four of us from S, with a promise to ‘buy you something later’. Two packets of Haribo Tangfastics, my favourite sweets, from P, wrapped wonkily in Christmas paper. Not exactly bumper. But you know what? It’s fine.

I take the kids to school and F tells everyone it’s my birthday, and my age. This is also fine. I’m not going to start lying about it. How old am I no-ow? I am 44. I am 45. Or 46, 47, 48. Not much has changed in the past few years. I am an adult. Whatever that is.

I watch P as we walk to school. Though I often forget how old I am, and when I remember it pulls me up short, he is of an age when every birthday is vital, when how many years (months, days) you’ve lived add up to power. When two years’ age difference is a chasm, an insurmountable status gap. Another small boy, a head taller than my son, just another kid to me, is as thrillingly attractive and powerful to P as a pop star. He keeps trying to play football with the older boys. He trots faster to catch up with them. I can see them tolerating his breathless jokes, bearing his presence, but only just.

P’s birthday parties involve football, usually; sometimes the cinema or Laser Quest. What did I do when I was his age? How about older? 15? I can remember my 17th birthday (in a Scout hall) and my 21st party (above a pub) and my 30th, and my 40th, just a few years ago. My 40th birthday party was very like my 30th. The main difference was that when a stranger offered me ecstasy, I didn’t take it.

I don’t want a party like that now. I’m not sure why. Some time over the past few years I lost the desire to be the centre of attention and the stamina required for all the organizational palaver. I wouldn’t mind a party in the summer, maybe, with champagne cocktails and up-and-at-’em music, around a heated open-air swimming pool. A barbecue. Nicely dressed young people topping up drinks. In Los Angeles.

But in January, in London, in an expensive, cramped, roped-off area of a pub that you have to vacate at 11 p.m. or share with whichever punters decide to wander in? No, thanks. Maybe I’ll think differently when I’m 49 and a half.

Our idea of adulthood is formed by our youth. Adults were a puzzle to me when I was young. I looked at them and thought: How did they ever get married? Who could love these enormous, slow-moving creatures, with their pitted skin and springy hair? Their trousers hung loose over their flattened behinds. Their chipped, crumby teeth were like the last biscuits in the tin. When they were close, unpleasant smells leaked from hidden places. They talked a lot, in booming voices, about nothing important. They sat down. Then they stayed sitting down.

(‘Come on, Mum!’ says F, in frustration. ‘Stop talking! Let’s PLAY!’)

Not all adults were the same. I settled on my dad’s lap and put my hands on the outside of his hands. I tried to force them together, to make him clap. He’d resist, hold steady, until suddenly, he relaxed, and let my pushing win. Blapp! His big hands, cupped, made the most impressive noise I’d ever heard. A gunshot, a crack that split the air, indoors or out. I used to try to copy him. But the Dad Power Clap cannot be made by the young. Only dads, with their dad hands, can create such thunder.

I liked my dad’s smell. He smelt of nothing much, Swarfega sometimes, toast sometimes, talc. He didn’t wear aftershave. My mum didn’t wear perfume. She had a bottle of Chanel No 5, which I played with, but the liquid was orange, the scent was off. Sometimes, she smoked in the car on the way from work and her clothes smelt, not like fire, but chemical, metallic. She hid her cigarettes from us in her handbag. ‘Death sticks’, some people called them. I took them one by one, from the golden box, examined them, slit them open to scrutinize the curling tobacco slivers. Death looked a lot like wood shavings.

She stood in front of me and my brother and said, ‘Look, my thighs join all the way up, too.’ This was to my brother. He was weird about his legs, because mine were a different shape, and he was younger and wanted to be like me. I knew it didn’t matter – who cared what your legs looked like? It was whether you could run fast that was important – but it was another reason to lord over him. I liked to emphasize our differences, though we were very similar. Our bodies were small and strong. We hung them upside-down from anything.

My mum wore no make-up. Her cosmetics bag contained one brown mascara, old and dried up, one lipstick and some shiny blue eye shadow. She rarely used any of them. Not when she went to work, as a secondary-school teacher, not when she saw friends. Only on special birthdays, when we went out to a restaurant to sit quietly and worry over cutlery selection. She wore trousers, no heels. In heels, she towered over my dad.

Neither of my parents put much effort into their appearance – odd, when we lived in a suburb that judged you by what you wore when you put out the bins – but, still, I thought they looked good. Handsome, rather than cute. Slightly 1960s, even in the 70s and 80s. My mum changed her hairstyle a lot: in the space of five years, she had a long orangey bob; a cap of sleek, dark curls; a blonde Purdey-style crop. She wore blouses that looked like shirts, nothing girly, no florals.

And, even when my dad got burnt in the sun, when his stomach reddened in stripes where the skin had folded as he’d sat reading, I thought he was fantastic. (His feet burnt too, so after one day of holiday he wore socks and sandals, like the university lecturer he was.) He was great at sport: football, cricket, throwing and catching, crazy golf, anything to do with a ball. Also, card games, building dens, drawing. He worked out the Rubik’s Cube in a matter of minutes. He could skim a stone so it bounced seven times. He had a side parting and his hair flopped over his right eye.

When I was P’s age, my mum was 37, my dad 40. When I think of my parents, I think of them then, and a little older, as I grew into my teens. I see them in their middle age. Was that their prime? It seemed so, to me.