Being middle-aged is like taking a warm bath – if you remember not to care
The middle-aged have pulled off an almighty swizz on the world: 40 is no longer old and only a really old person would remark upon your advancing age, while 50 is a fait accompli; of course you are middle-aged and if anyone wanted to mention it they should have done so years ago. It is a fabulous act of cunning, as if a 16-year-old told you that it was the most suburban thing that they weren’t allowed to vote, then turned round at 21 and said: “What did you let me vote for? You can see that I’m still basically a child.” Except a young person would never do that, because they have more honour.
There is a hard ball of truth among this candyfloss of spin, which is the age of 45. You’re not 40. It’s not the new 35. You are not some symmetrical, nothing number – 42, 44 – to which no meaning can be attached. You are not mourning your youth, which is years behind you, but you are no longer in that enjoyable limbo where there is no name for what you are. You are more than a bit middleaged: you are its dictionary definition.
I turned 45 on Tuesday. In glorious celebration,I went to the Wetherspoons in Ramsgate and had the most disgusting yet enjoyable of all my 45 birthday lunches. Sure, I disagree with Tim Martin, Mr Spoons, on political matters, but when you’re relieving him of a pint for £2.47 it’s impossible not to feel as though you have the upper hand.
The lament of the middle-aged woman is that she becomes invisible, but I am not about to embark on an elaborate whinge about whether to use that to fight crime or promote evil. I have no insight to share about whether or not it’s feminist to get a gel manicure. I didn’t wake up wanting to wear purple, but I did misremember the poem about wearing purple, which is about old not middle age and is not by Pam Ayres, and that is quite a middleaged thing to do. I didn’t go to my Wikipedia page to make sure my year of birth said 1973 because someone in the webosphere is convinced that it’s 1963. I didn’t start calculating whether I was more or less than halfway through my life.
Martin Amis, back in the days when we all looked to him to unlock the world’s mysteries, said that life had become quite tedious until he reached his 40s, when he started to contemplate death, which livened things up a bit. I thought this would happen automatically, which turned out not to be true. Confronting your own mortality is something you have to decide to do, and practise, in front of an audience. It’s more like learning to play the saxophone than sliding inexorably into the grave.
As a category of wisdom or authority, middle age is more or less bled out: you would never want to claim either of those things, because they are roundabout ways of saying you have stopped listening. Yet middle age does have a practical application. There is a long list of things you must now stop doing, either to make your middle age last as long as possible (stop drinking, stop loafing about, stop eating processed meats; we could file all of this under “stop going to the Spoons”) or to make it clear that you are selfaware and not pretending to be an age you are not (stop dancing, stop wearing bikinis, stop with the radical politics). It sounds a bit limiting, until you remember that you may vow to stop doing those things, but you never will, and that this is also what youth is like, with its constant injunctions to start things (a career, a relationship, a family, a moral crusade, a tech empire). Then, 45 is like a warm bath, but one you can get into on your own.
Big money, big plans – but no ideas “The division, frustration and anger is all too easy to see,” says the mission statement of United for Change, a new political movement launching this week. It aims to recapture the centre ground, where politicians want to mend rather than break things and everyone agrees. It has big money, from Simon Franks, the founder of LoveFilm, a prototype – the En Marche movement in France – and a plan to get 100,000 people signed up, then to get disgruntled MPs to join.
What it doesn’t have is a programme, unless you count public services that work, a tough message on immigration and maximum terms for MPs. This is the conundrum of centrism: it’s so passionate in its conviction that power should be returned to it, but, when pressed on what it would use that power for, it comes back with platitudinous managerialism and bilious bolt-ons. The precepts of centrism are as follows: “Don’t we all want proper social care, a properly funded health service, a social safety net with holes big enough that those notorious yet numerically insignificant benefit fraudsters will fall through? Aren’t we all patriots at heart? Don’t we all hate immigrants and politicians? Come on, this is just common sense.”
Sometimes it tells us the robots are coming, but mainly to amplify the resignation at its kernel: a sense that nothing is worth doing that reasonable people haven’t already thought of, yet the reasonable person is defined by wanting to keep things roughly as they are, only better.
Essentially, it’s the policy version of LoveFilm: the important thing is to get a load of people to sign up. If they then order a load of status quo pension policies they will never watch, plus a bit of soft-nationalism, because they are only human, who cares? You have the database. You can always sell it on.
How to shut down Boris Johnson’s burqa ‘debate’ in two minutes
Boris Johnson’s inalienable right to make hostile remarks was defended this week, as ever, by the assertion that, however crass he is, he can’t be shut down, because we need to “start the debate”. In fact, we do not need Johnson and his cavalier debasement of the public sphere for this debate: we could start and finish it in two minutes. Do we want to police what women wear? No. Do women in burqas pose a significant crime risk? No. Does it matter what they do in France or Denmark, where feminism and race intersect in culturally idiosyncratic ways that we couldn’t emulate even if we wanted to? Not really, no. There, done.
Centrism says: 'Aren’t we all patriots at heart? Don’t we all hate immigrants and politicians?'