One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo

The midlife crisis was invented in 1965 by Elliott Jaques, some say, or by Erik H. Erikson, others say, which probably brings on a bit of a crisis for whichever of them is the actual guy. Erik or Elliott suggested it could start any time under the age of sixty, but a more recent UK study reported in the Guardian and The Times, although that doesn’t make it true, pins the average age at forty-three for men and forty-four for women.

(Recently some mooching kids in America have started trying to claim a quarter-life crisis. Quarter-life crisis! The nerve! Is there nothing this rotten generation won’t try hijack to make it all about them? Get in line, you little creeps, we were here first.)

I sat with my partner one Saturday morning after the visit to the doctor, drinking coffee at a sidewalk café.

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I won’t buy a sports car or anything.”

“It doesn’t just go away. If you leave this long enough, it’ll just get worse.”

She had a point. If a midlife crisis is anything, it’s a reaction to the anxious realisation of how late it is, and how unprepared you are. The longer you ignore the anxiety and pretend it isn’t happening, the worse the reaction becomes. People often laugh at men having midlife crises because they suddenly up and do something comical: hair transplants; calf implants; moving to Montague to run a worm farm; stocking up on body paint and MDMA and going to Afrika-Burn to offer free foot massages to hippy girls. It’s funny till it turns sad. Women do things too, but men have it worse because they ignore things for longer and then do things without knowing why. I don’t know why that is, but I’m guessing testosterone is involved. Whenever there’s a spectacular display of human dumbassery, you can bet there’ll be some testosterone somewhere at the bottom of it.

When the crisis comes, my partner and I agreed, you have to do something about it, and it matters what you do.

We watched a peloton of middle-aged cyclists go by like a skein of dehydrated geese.

“Should I take up cycling?” I said reluctantly. “I could train for the Argus or something.”

It’s not an original idea. Every old bloke I know is on a bike nowadays, whirling their scrawny legs and zipped-up bellies around the bitter streets, balanced on narrow plastic items more like medical instruments than seats, heads helmeted like the tip of some bulbous alien penis. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by cycling, starving themselves on energy gel, dragging themselves through the chilly streets at dawn, looking for a place to take a selfie. I’ll say this for them – they do seem to lose weight. If you’ve always wanted to look more like Sarah Jessica Parker, cycling’s definitely the sport for you.

It’s not for me, though. I don’t want to be seen in public shrink-wrapped in multicoloured clingfilm. Also, when you talk to those guys you hear words that no man should utter, like “chafing” and “bruised perineum”. If ever I bruise my perineum – and I’m kind of hoping I won’t – it should be doing something more pleasurable than pedalling into a headwind.

My partner looked at the muddle of middle-aged fellows on their modern penny-farthings. “I’d rather you did anything other than cycling,” she said. “I’d rather you ran off with a twenty-year-old.”

There’s no chance of that, and not just because of how I feel about twenty-year-olds and how I feel about my partner. It’s only long-married men who crave sexual novelty. Ask anyone with a few decades of sexual novelty behind them: sexual novelty’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Sexual novelty gets boring after a while.

“What you need is a quest,” she said. “If you don’t have a decent quest, you’ll do something stupid like Daphne or like Mike.”

Case study 1: Mike X: The Sliding Doors crisis

Mike is a good friend of mine, a little older than me, who married early and has two children. One day not so long ago his wife – allegedly playing Angry Birds on his iPad – came across a photograph of another woman and a small child. She didn’t recognise the woman and child, but she did recognise the backdrop: it appeared to have been taken in their lounge. But it was such a peculiarly domestic photograph – mom jiggling baby on her knee; baby drinking from a sippy cup – she was baffled. Why would a mistress bring her young child over to the house? And when did this even happen? The photo appeared to have been taken some time in the evening. She’s always home in the evening.

Mike was the man to solve the mystery but at first he was reluctant, as husbands sometimes are. Husbands have a good sense of narrative construction: they know that the truth is always more enjoyable after a long build-up. He tried the “I don’t know who that is” defence, followed by the “I can’t remember” gambit, interspersed with the “What were you doing on my iPad?” counter-attack, as first used by Boris Spassky against Bobby Fischer in Reykjavík in 1972. As Spassky said after the match, “It’s a good defence, but only when you don’t have something to defend.”

The truth came out, as it sometimes does. Mike loved his family but a few years ago, when he was forty-three, he started wondering how life would be if he had made different decisions. But this is the strange part: he didn’t make different decisions; he made the same decisions. His business takes him to Johannesburg for several days a week, most weeks, and he met someone there and concealed from her that he was married. They started a relationship and she fell pregnant. He established her in a house in Park View that he decorated, for want of better ideas, precisely the same as his own house. He painted the walls the same colour, bought the same furniture, the same rugs. She even, although this was a coincidence, cut her hair in the same style as his wife’s. Neither family knew about the other. The most crushing thing for his wife, I should think, is that she had married a man with so little imagination that even in his parallel universe, his shadow life, he did everything precisely the same.

I sat with Mike in the glum bachelor flat he now rents on Corlett Drive. We sat on beanbags because in both break-ups he did not get to keep the furniture. “Look on the bright side,” I told him. “You don’t have to wonder ‘what if ’, like everyone else. You know that no matter what, you’d have probably made the same mistakes and still ended in the same dumb place.”

Mike didn’t answer. He just poured us another glass of cheap whisky.

Case study 2: Napoleon Bonaparte:

The Forty-Three-Year-Old crisis

One day I’ll publish my theory that some of the most critical moments in history only happened because someone or other was turning forty-three. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve achieved, when the crisis strikes you feel the need to do more, and something different, and right now, while you still can. If you’re a man of action and influence, it’s like suddenly putting a teenaged boy in charge of national policy.

Consider Napoleon Bonaparte. By most standards – yours and mine, say – Boney had done quite a bit by the time he was forty-two. He’d invaded Egypt, seized France in a coup d’état, become First Consul and then, quite impressively, Emperor of France. He’d fought a war in Europe against a coalition of all the powers and was handily beating them. He was almost invincible in land warfare. The only way he could blow this would be by making some vast over-reaching strategic blunder, and he had shown little inclination to blunder strategically. Then two months before his forty-third birthday he gathered up an army of 400 000 men and invaded Russia.

Napoleon’s birthday was 15 August, the height of European summer, and he must have had a pretty sweet time of it out there on the warm steppes, toasting his troops with a glass of Vin de Constance, murmuring to himself, “Ah, maybe forty-three’s not so bad.” Before the end of November he came crawling back over the Berezina River with only 40 000 men left, frozen, starving, eating their own horses.

Not everyone works as well for my theory as Napoleon, but some come close. Hitler was forty-three in 1932 and that’s the year he decided to take up German citizenship and run for chancellor of Germany. Mind you, he started the Second World War when he was fifty, which I’m told is also quite a tough year, and then invaded Russia the year after, so maybe he was just a late bloomer.

Saloth Sar, the hitherto easy-going leader of the Khmer Rouge, turned forty-three in 1968. In that year he underwent a personality change, became more secretive and sullen, ordered the people around him not to approach him directly, and changed his name to Pol Pot. He launched the Cambodian national uprising two months before his forty-third birthday, and had murdered nearly a quarter of his countrymen by the time he turned fifty.

Of all the weird, pointless midlife-crisis quests, trekking to the South Pole has to be high among them. There’s no money to be made from it, no land or minerals to be annexed, nothing but hardship, challenge, frostbite and the satisfaction of proving you can do without your fingertips. Robert Falcon Scott was forty-two when he set out on his doomed expedition to furthest south, and spent his forty-third birthday wintering on the Antarctic ice-shelf. Things were already going wrong, but he made the decision to push south and never came back. Roald Amundsen beat him to it, arriving there on 11 December 1911, three months before his own forty-third birthday.

Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous expedition to cross Antarctica from sea to sea via the pole, which ended with his ship being crushed in the pack-ice and all his men marooned, started in 1914 when he was forty and ended when he was forty-three. Some day, you’ll see, history will prove me right. The key to almost all catastrophes lies in the midlife crisis. Douglas Adams knew it before me: the answer to life, the universe and everything is forty-two, just about to turn forty-three.

My partner was right. A quest gives shape to your struggle. It gives you something productive to do while you work through the mismatch in your life, the struggle between the part of you that’s still growing and the part that knows it’s dying. You can pour your energy and anxiety into the quest instead of allowing it to thrash around, unfocused and blind, making bad decisions.

But you need to think it through before you go a-questing. If you jump too far, you end up like Robert Falcon Scott. If you don’t jump far enough, you end up like my friends Hanneli and Danny.

Case study 3: Hanneli D:

The Not Going Far Enough crisis

Hanneli is forty-two and has three children and thinks at least one of them was a mistake. She loves them all equally, you understand, and wouldn’t part with any of them, but she still thinks that three is too many and one or two would have been enough.

Hanneli decided she would climb Kilimanjaro. She was determined. She bought the boots and the jacket and the extra socks. She bought the beanie and the headband that goes over your ears. She trained by walking up the Westcliff stairs and watching movies with mountain climbing: Everest documentaries and Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction and Sylvester Stallone in the one where he looks like a rocky outcrop. I tried to lend her a documentary about Kilimanjaro but she didn’t want it. “I want it to be a surprise,” she said. “I want to test my limits.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“I want to face my fears in the death zone.”

“There isn’t a death zone on Kilimanjaro,” I told her. “It’s not high enough. It’s just a lot of walking. Are you sure this is the thing you want to do?”

She went to Tanzania then came back. She seemed despondent.

“I walked a long way,” she said. “Mostly up, while the porters carried everything on their shoulders. Then I got there, and there was a lot of cloud, but I could also see some of the countryside, and I was quite tired, and then I came down.”

“Still though,” I said. “You faced your fears.”

“I actually wasn’t all that afraid,” she confessed.

“Hey,” I said. “You sat on top of Kilimanjaro. Can you see a new tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” she said. “Tomorrow I have to drop Oliver at school. Then after that I have to pick him up again.”

And she walked off with her shoulders slumped and her problems unresolved. There’s nothing sadder than someone wasting their midlife crisis.

Case study 4: Danny B:

The Going In The Wrong Direction crisis

My friend Danny is my age, and last December he decided he needed to spend some time with himself in Patagonia. He left on the 23rd and didn’t take a cellphone or a laptop. He wanted to experience nature and solitude and rediscover himself. His wife, who is the real hero of this story, didn’t object to him spending Christmas in Tierra del Fuego while she stayed at home with the children. “It’s better than running off with a twenty-year-old,” she figured.

Danny spent two weeks getting drunk in hotels and rented rooms, tearfully trying to call home to tell them he missed them. Now he’s in training for Iron Man. He’s just come back from Tokyo and he’s off to Barcelona in a few days. The goal he has set himself is to compete in the world championships of the Iron Man. He knows he can’t qualify on his times alone, because he’s not very good at the Iron Man, but there’s a special category of qualification: if you complete fifteen Iron Men in fifteen years, you have entry to the finals. He’s trying to do all fifteen in three years to get it over with, because he hates it so much.

Case study 5: Vincent Deary: The Gauguin crisis

Families and relatives of middle-aged men are understandably most wary of the crisis that involves giving it all up to follow their dreams. They’re afraid he’ll turn into Paul Gauguin. In 1891, when he was forty-three years old, Gauguin abandoned his life in France and sailed off to Tahiti for the first time to escape “everything that is conventional” and to paint women with flowers in their hair. He may be a big wheel in post-impressionism now, but he died penniless fifteen years later of a heart attack brought on by alcohol, morphine and syphilis, while waiting to begin a prison sentence in Papeete.

Consider now the case of Vincent Deary. Vincent Deary was a psychotherapist working for the National Health Service in south London. At the age of forty, somewhat spoiling my sequence of forty-threes but close enough, he sold his house, quit his job and moved to Edinburgh. Edinburgh was Vincent Deary’s Tahiti, and he went there to write a book. He gave himself two years, and shut himself away in a garret. He spent the first year thinking and writing notes, and then another four years writing the damn thing. The book he wrote was a lengthy philosophical musing about his life called How to Live, intended to be the first of a trilogy. (I don’t know what he’s intending to call the sequels. When to Live? Whether to Live? Harry Potter and the Presumptuous Book Title?) At the age of forty-five he finished, then put the manuscript to one side, the midlife crisis presumably out of his system, and went back to work, taking a job as a research fellow at Northumbria University.

Five years later, when he turned fifty, the Hitler year, he showed someone the manuscript for the first time. She liked it, and so did the three agents he sent it to. And so did several publishers. Finally, after a bidding war, he sold it to an imprint of Penguin for what is coyly referred to in the UK as a six-figure advance, or, to translate that into rands, a seven-figure advance. It was published in the UK on the day I’m writing these words. Vincent Deary is the worst kind of case study: the man who risked it all and took a swing at a ridiculous and improbable quest, who not only didn’t die of syphilis while awaiting imprisonment, but brought meaning and satisfaction into his life and became a millionaire in the process. There’s no comfort there. Case studies about midlife crises are supposed to reassure you that it’s folly to drop everything, that middle-aged people trying something new are comical and should be pitied. The comfort is in being told that the right thing to do is nothing. What’s my excuse now? The odds are against me? Who cares about the odds? Damn you, Vincent Deary. Couldn’t you have climbed Kilimanjaro instead?

“Do you want to give it all up and take a swing at changing your life?” my partner asked. “I’ll help you.”

“Maybe later. Right now I should try something else. Something less permanent.”

So we sat in the café and tried to work out some guidelines for the midlife-crisis quest.

“What about that list you wrote?” she said. “The list of things to do before you die? There should be something on there, right? It’s a place to start.”

I went through them again, but there was nothing there. Most of them were too expensive (“Learn to fly”) or inconvenient (“Spend a night in the ruins of Dracula’s castle in Romania”) or time-consuming (“Win two Booker prizes”) or delusional (“Weigh 80 kilograms”) or weirdly specific and unsatisfying (“Visit the English village of Nether Wallop”).

I shook my head as I read them. It was all too flimsy, too quirky, too serious or too impossible. Oh, what a pitiful midlife crisis I’m having: most people look back on their achievements with dissatisfaction; I’m even disgruntled with the things I haven’t achieved.

My partner suggested that when we’re faced with choices in life, very often we should take the one that frightens us most.

“What about giving it all up and changing your life like Vincent Deary? That’s scary.”

She narrowed her eyes a bit, the way she does when she wants to argue but is making the strategic decision to wait for a better time. She suggested I take another look at my list and see which one there most frightened me.

When I was ten years old we lived in a pink house on a green ridge above the Indian Ocean. My father was dead and my mother worked late and I was quite lonely. Each afternoon after school I walked down to the beach to see if the ocean had washed up any bottles with messages from castaways corked inside. Often I would swim.

The sand shelves steeply on the Bluff, and the waves break big and untidy so you have to duck under the first breakers and by that time you’re already out of your depth, but ordinarily that didn’t bother me. There was always a rip at Brighton Beach but on this day it was especially strong. It was a grey day, the sea was grey and the grey clouds hung low, and there was no one on the beach. I tried to swim back in but I couldn’t so I kicked water and waited to get my breath back. You can wait in the Indian Ocean because the water’s warm, but the longer I waited, the further out I went.

Things were no longer in my control. I thought, I’m going to be the boy in school who drowned. There was some consolation in that. Even in years to come, when old classmates come together they’ll say, “Remember there was that boy who drowned?” It’s a kind of immortality, even if no one remembers my name.

Then a teenager in a red swimming costume came from the lifesavers’ clubhouse with a red plastic float. He swam out to me and I held onto him and to the float and he swam us sideways and then to shore. I didn’t mention it to my mom, but after that day I didn’t swim on my own any more. I larked around in the pool at school but I never swam in dams or fast rivers or the sea, not without being able to stand. I didn’t ever again want that feeling of nothing below me.

Fifteen years later on a Friday evening in winter I went to Camps Bay beach with some people I worked with. We drank some wine and it was dusk and quite cold but I was trying to impress a girl so I decided to swim.

I didn’t intend to go out so far but again there was a rip. I hadn’t been so deep in fifteen years, and never in water so cold. Your breathing becomes shallow in the cold; you pant like a dog. Quick, shallow breathing increases levels of carbon dioxide in your blood, which increases fatigue and brings on a dizzy feeling like panic. The dizzy feeling like panic becomes actual panic.

I wasn’t far out but I couldn’t stand. I waved for help. Someone waved back. Weirdly, I was too embarrassed to shout for help. I didn’t want to be a bother.

Then a man came running into the sea. “Hold on!” he shouted, and when he reached me I held on, trying not to pull him under. He had a British accent.

He tried to swim us to shore but the rip was too strong and he couldn’t get us both in. I told him to leave me and go in himself and he hesitated but then he tried. But maybe he had waited too long, because he couldn’t get back in either. I apologised to him for all of this. I am socially awkward at the best of times, and this was my worst WASPy nightmare: Not merely have I inconvenienced this man, now I’ve killed him too.

He told me he was a lifesaver back home in Cornwall and he was here on holiday. I told him Cape Town would be much nicer in summer, although it can be a bit windy.

I knew we were going to drown and I wasn’t panicking any more. I wasn’t even cold any more. I remember the pencil colour of the sky and the dark mountains behind the beach and the clear cold water on my face.

Then the man took my hand, and with his other hand he reached out and I saw that he was taking someone else’s hand. There was a human chain of men and women stretching into the sea from the beach – lifesavers, passers-by. We were linked to the land, there was someone at the end of the chain with their feet on the land and that brought our feet there too.

Afterwards, shaking, I remembered how convinced I was that I would die, and I thought I had somehow cheated it, and that having cheated it, nothing else could kill me. I was marked down to die in deep water, and as long as I never swam in deep water again, nothing would ever happen to me. It had happened twice in my life and I’d survived, and then it happened a third time with Clarence and the sharks, and there’s no way I would be that lucky again.

And there on my list of things to do before I’m dead was number 4: “Swim across the Dardanelles”.

The Dardanelles is the long channel of water that runs between the Black Sea and the Aegean. The ancient Greeks called it the Hellespont, or “Sea of Helle”, because that’s where Helle drowned. Helle and her twin brother Phrixus, in the usual complicated story of step-motherly resentment that the ancient Greeks liked to tell each other as bedtime tales, were to be sacrificed by their dad’s new wife Ino, but their real mom sent a flying golden ram to save them. All went well but these were the days before seatbelts were standard on flying golden rams. Helle fell off, landed in the Dardanelles and drowned. It’s one of the recurring themes in stories of the Dardanelles: people are always drowning there.

(In case you’re worrying, Phrixus made it safely to Colchis, where he – a little ungratefully – sheared the flying ram and gave the golden fleece to the king as a gift. Later Jason and his Argonauts came rowing up the Hellespont on a quest to find it. History doesn’t record how old Jason was, but I’m guessing forty-two, going on forty-three.)

The Dardanelles is the Black Sea’s outlet pipe, a deep, wide channel of ocean that’s called the Bosphorus until it flows down past Istanbul into the Sea of Marmara and then onward to Troy and the Gallipoli peninsula and the sea. It divides two continents: this bank is Europe, the other side is Asia, and in between is the sea running like a river, up to six kilometres wide, pouring billions of kilolitres of salt water from the shores of Russia, Georgia and the Crimea down an immense crack in the earth to the wind-tossed Aegean.

The Hellespont was an ancient symbol of separation. To cross it with intent was to invade another hemisphere and violate the natural order and it was always punished by the gods. When Xerxes came marching westwards out of Persia to invade the Greeks in 480 BC – thus setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to Thermopylae and the movie 300 and ultimately Zack Snyder becoming the Batman v. Superman director – he crossed the Hellespont by creating a bridge of boats tied bow to stern. When a storm destroyed the bridge he had the water whipped 300 times and shackles thrown into the waves to enslave the strait. Thus chastened, the Dardanelles suffered him to build a second bridge and march across a million men, the greatest army ever seen.

A hundred and fifty years later Alexander the Great marched the other way and did the same thing, only without the whipping and the shackles. Crossing the Hellespont was like crossing the Rubicon, only before the Rubicon was invented and fifteen times wider. Once you crossed it, alea jacta est: you couldn’t change your mind. Xerxes came back from Greece humbled with his army shattered and in revolt. Alexander never came back. He died in Asia without ever reaching the Hellespont again, and his empire fell apart before his body was properly cool.

The east–west division is one the ancients took seriously. The Egyptians built their cities on one side of the Nile and their necropolises on the other. One side for the living, where the sun rises each morning like a baby; the other for the dead.

Isn’t that what mid-life is? The crossing of something, some dark river, and once you’re there, you can’t come back? It’s a pretty good symbol. Someone looking for a quest for their midlife crisis should definitely do that one, but what does that have to do with me?

And then I remembered how this stupid idea made it onto my list in the first place. It was Lord Byron.

Byron was a shrimpy character who limped from a club foot and suffered all his life from fluctuating weight – as little as sixty kilograms, as much as eighty-nine. Despite his limp, or perhaps because of it, he liked a swim.

He swam in the River Cam while still at university but that’s no big deal, lots of people do, especially in Fresher’s Week and often with their clothes on. He swam the Tagus in Lisbon and the Grand Canal in Venice and on 3 May 1810, before he’d written anything much, while on a kind of Napoleonic-era gap year around Europe and the Levant, he swam across the Hellespont.

Actually he failed the first time and was fished out by a faithful servant in a rowboat, but he tried again and got it right on the second go. Afterwards he wrote home in a letter: “I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical.”

Which is pretty much what you’d expect from a twenty-two-year-old who hasn’t done anything yet. When we’re twenty-two, we’re so grateful to do anything, we always think it’s the best thing we could have done.

Afterwards he went home and published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made him very famous, and married his half-sister, which made him very notorious, and eventually died fighting to liberate Greece from the Turks, aged thirty-six. He didn’t have a chance to have a midlife crisis, which may be just as well since it’s hard to see what more he could have done, but it’s also very sad because poets become most interesting when they’ve passed middle age.

At any rate I must have read about Byron while I was a smug, un-ageing thirtysomething in the comfort of my own apartment, possibly with a drink within reach, because I immediately scribbled it down on my list of things to do, almost certainly thinking, “If a runty poet with weight issues and a gammy leg could do it, how hard can it be?”

But now I’m forty, wiser and more wizened, and I know there’s not a chance I’m getting into deep water on the far side of the world.

I took my partner for a walk that evening and told her about Byron and the Hellespont, and how he was the first recorded person to do it, and she wanted to know what gave him the idea, and I told her about Hero and Leander.

We were walking on the Promenade beside the sea wall as I told her, and the sea was purpling in the dusk and the lights of the ships in the roadstead were coming on like the lamps of distant hilltowns. Walking with her before dinner is my favourite time of day, and it’s always better when I have a story to tell.

I told her how Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite and sworn to purity, thus forbidden to the lovelorn Leander. She lived in a high stone tower in the town of Sestos, on the European side, and Leander lived in Abydos, across the strait in Asia.

Each night Leander would slip from his home and into the wine-dark rushing sea and swim across, guided by a lantern that Hero hung from the top of the tower. It’s unclear from the story how he managed to get up to her – this isn’t Rapunzel, so perhaps there was just a door and stairs – but they would dally the night away and he’d slip back through the waves by dawn’s peachy light. You can tell Hero and Leander were younger than forty-three in this tale, because no one ever says anything about them taking a night off every now and then to get some sleep.

One dark night a wind came up, and all unknown to Hero the lantern was blown out. Leander lost his way and drowned. Hero waited and waited but he didn’t come, and when she discovered the extinguished light and realised what had happened, she threw herself from the tower in sorrow and remorse.

“Those Greeks, hey,” said my partner. “Even when the girl’s the Hero, she still has to wait for the man.”

The sun had set now and the air was grainy as a Kentridge sketch. A yellow moon came up over the mountain.

“You know,” she said, “if you were to swim across the Dardanelles, I’d wait for you on the other side.”

And she smiled shyly, the way she does when she’s made a joke, and I thought about swimming a quest to impress her, and of her being on the other side, and just like that, with a sickly, heavy feeling in my stomach, I knew that’s what I had to do.