Which crisis is this again?

Sam said he was having a mid-life crisis. ‘‘No you’re not,’’ I said, ‘‘you’re 64. A mid-life crisis is when you’re 40, and you realise with a sudden smack of horror that half your life is over, and it was the half with all the good bits in. And you further realise that if life is ever going to amount to anything it had better start amounting pretty damn quick, so you ditch the creature comforts and head for the hills to become a potter and have tantric sex.

‘‘But no-one wants to buy your pots or have sex with you, tantric or not, and anyway you’ve slipped a disc, so a year later you’re back at the accountancy firm because, say what you like about creature comforts, they are at least comfortable. That’s a mid-life crisis,’’ I said. ‘‘Is it now?’’ said Sam.

‘‘Yes it is,’’ I said, ‘‘and you’re not having one. What you’re having is a late-life crisis which is when you realise with a sudden smack of horror that for the last 64 years you’ve been shuffling forward with the crowd along an enormous diving board and now the people immediately in front of you have started plunging off the end.

‘‘You look down and all you can see is the chlorinated water of oblivion sparkling at your feet and the crowd at your back is still shuffling unstoppably forward. That’s a late-life crisis.’’ ‘‘Is it now?’’ said Sam.

‘‘Yes it is,’’ I said. ‘‘My old schoolmate Mark is about to become a grandfather and when he heard the news the first phrase to leave his lips was, ‘My life is over,’ which did not go down well with either his wife or his newly pregnant daughter.

‘Especially when compared with the reaction of the foetus’ other grandfather, who on hearing the news burst into tears of, at least ostensibly, joy. Mark is of the opinion that the man was merely buttering up the womenfolk, but he has not said so to the man’s face. Or indeed to the womenfolk’s.

‘‘The problem, according to Mark, is that being a grandfather does not tally with his sense of his own identity, which is frankly little changed from when he had an abundance of hair but no money, and dreamed of football by day and girls by night.

‘‘Furthermore, says Mark, he now realises that his own maternal grandfather, who had always seemed the oldest of old men, had in fact been trapped by time’s one trick in exactly the same way. And what Mark had taken for the befuddlement of age had been merely shock, and that the old boy had been silently mouthing the universal mantra of the late-life crisis, the three-word wail hurled out into the blackness of eternity, ‘Is that it?’’’

‘‘And is that it?’’ said Sam.

‘‘Of course it is,’’ I said, ‘‘but there are various form of self-deluding therapy available, such as golf.’’

‘‘Golf?’’

‘‘Yes, golf. I played golf, after a fashion, last week on a cold wet afternoon and afterwards sat in the clubhouse with a glass of consolation and a hot sausage, as you do, along with a bunch of men from the business end of the diving board, and reflected that of the 120 or so golf shots I had just played the only ones I could remember were the half dozen good ones – the sunk putt, the fluked chip, the drive that didn’t veer violently off to the right – and they were enough to delude me that things which will only get worse might yet get better.’’

‘‘I see,’’ said Sam.