am I too old for a midlife crisis?
I've been thinking I must be. I know life expectancy is creeping up but half a century sounds more than half over to me. So I'm guessing mathematically that's too old for a midlife crisis.
What are the symptoms anyway? How critical do things have to be to constitute a crisis? Does a vague ennui and mild dissatisfaction cut it? I've been wondering because for a while now I've been thinking of buying myself a bike. Not a motorcycle. So it can't be that big of a crisis, can it? I don't want to be one of those middle-aged blokes in leather [1] who spends his weekends roaring around the Highlands looking for a pub to drink real ale in and conspicuously talking about the lean angles he gets out of his Ducati [2].
No, a bike bike. Which would of, course, require me to be a middle-aged man in Lycra and I'm not sure that's much better. Certainly not for anyone who would have to look at me. But I'm hesitating because I don't have a shed to keep a bike in. Which kind of scuppers the idea from the get go. Where could I keep it?
I could get a shed, I suppose. Maybe that could represent the visible manifestation of my situation. I could become a man in a shed. But I'd have to build it and I'm not much of a builder of things. I even get people in to build stuff from Ikea [3]. Anyway, what do middle-aged men get up to in sheds? Whittling, I think. (Do men still whittle?)
Presumably the digital era means they're not where men store their porn stash any more (not that I'd know anything about that. We never had a shed shed when I was a kid. We had a coal shed. Full of coal mostly. And my bike. There would have been no room for copies of Mayfair and Penthouse. Honest, mum).
Maybe I could get a turntable. There are all these old records in the cupboard that J keeps telling me to get rid of but I have held on to even though it's been 20 years and counting since I had a record deck. I could look them out and get something to play them on. But do I want to hear the Thompson Twins again? Frankly, I didn't want to hear them in 1983. So why did I buy that 12 inch of Hold Me Now in the first place?
This is the problem. I could commit myself to something new - a bike or a shed or a record deck -but who's to say I will remain interested for the half or third or quarter or sixth of my life that I have left. It will just be more stuff that my daughters need to get rid of. And there's enough of that already.
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