Best laid schemes o’ mice an’ (middle aged) men

Jonathan Brocklebank

ONE day in Ayrshire in November 1785, a young farmer named Robert accidentally destroyed a mouse’s nest with his plough, leaving the creature homeless as winter set in. It would probably die and Robert felt bad.

He composed a poem on the spot, lamenting that the mouse’s ‘wee bit hoosie’ was ‘in ruin’ and that, consequently, ‘the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’.

And, in this, the ploughman was right. Eternally so.

More than two centuries after Scotland’s bard wrote these words, a beautiful Slovenian model wed an American billionaire much older than she – as the beautiful and the rich are wont to do – and nestled into a life of stupendous privilege.

It should have been win-win. Either with Donald Trump or without him, she would be financially comfortable all her days.

Today, to her evident discomfort, she is both fabulously wealthy and First Lady of the United States – possibly for another seven years. Ah, the best-laid schemes… Henry Bolton, the chap who, at the time of writing, was still Ukip leader, was supposed to be his party’s future until his head was turned, days into the job, by a peroxide model less than half his age, for whom he decided to leave his wife.

Farce

Alas, that scheme went agley, too, when Jo Marney’s racist rants about Prince Harry’s fiancée were exposed. Even Mr Bolton’s plan to dump her seems to be going south.

Watching this farce unfold in the news is another man who could regale Burns suppers with tales of best-laid schemes. Former prime minister David Cameron once took this car crash of a party so seriously he promised a referendum on Europe in order to see Ukip off at the polls.

The result of that referendum cost him his career.

Isn’t it ironic, then, that in the week we celebrate the works and cruelly short life of the Scottish poet who noticed that plans fall through, growing numbers of young Scots complain they are not in control of their destiny?

According to the annual Prince’s Trust Macquarie Youth Index, they are less happy and less confident than at any time on record.

Half of 16 to 25-year-olds are fretting about the jobs market and 32 per cent say they don’t feel in charge of their lives. Almost a fifth believe they will amount to nothing and nearly two-thirds think the political climate is making them antsy.

As the father of a student daughter who falls slap in the middle of this age group and worries about all of the above, I have to say I am not unsympathetic to their plight.

Being young and having time on your side and a world of opportunity at your feet is probably no easier than it once was – and may even be harder. But try being middleaged. Fast-forward your lives three decades or so and imagine feeling even more nervous and even less in control than you were when you were 20 and playing on the low stakes poker tables.

Behind those middle-aged masks of practised serenity, little of what goes on could be described as control.

In my kitchen lies the piece of plastic I received for my 50th birthday from the Scottish Bowel Screening Programme. I am supposed to do something with it but for now it sits as a monument to the householder’s powerlessness over what will take him.

You fear you may never get a job? But of course you will. Middle-aged people are vacating jobs all the time – some willingly, others less so – and hastily laying new schemes for paying mortgages and running cars (not to mention supporting nextgeneration family members) without a regular salary.

You will get a job because someone older and better paid is going to make way for you.

Axe

And, poor petals, those stormy political waters are making you nervous. That is rather rich coming from the youth of Scotland.

Spare a thought for the middle-aged who know perfectly well that, if Britain is to be split apart, it is Scotland’s impressionable 16 to 25-yearolds, first and foremost, who will be wielding the axe.

Independence seduces no demographic as effectively as the young and politically naïve which, of course, is why it was so crucial for the SNP to have 16-year-olds voting in the 2014 referendum.

Kids anxious about politics? Try being an older voter going to the polls alongside schoolchildren who think the English Tories are about to privatise the NHS in Scotland.

For the 19 per cent of young people who think their life will never amount to anything, there is at least the enticing prospect that they might turn out to be silly sausages worrying over nothing.

Rather less consolation attends the middle-aged as they rue their mistakes and missed opportunities.

So chin up. The supposed control over their destinies which the youth believe they see in their elders is but an illusion. Young, middle-aged, elderly… across much of our lives we have dominion over our fate in the way a surfer has dominion over the sea.

Schemes gang agley, as Burns, who never lived to see middle age, lyrically noted.

And sometimes there’s not a damn thing we or the mouse or Melania Trump can do about it. Unless she fancies filing for divorce.