Feeling unexpectedly wistful about weather forecasts
Sunday, May 17, 2009
It is well known that men hitting 40 tend to experience unwelcome worries and anxieties about their lives. It also well known that they try to mollify these feelings by buying ostentatious new cars, taking up expensive new hobbies or having affairs. But what no one warns you about are the new strange feelings, feelings that are a mixture of sentiment, paranoia and hallucination, about seemingly random everyday objects and occurrences. Thanks, I suppose, to loss of certainty and the growing awareness of death, mundane events suddenly seem laden with significance, while activities once associated with hope abruptly turn into rituals of hate and despair. It’s not necessarily a bad thing - in fact it usually feels quite good – but it can be disorientating, a bit like those moments stepping out of a dark pub into the sunshine makes you realise that you’re drunk. Is it just me, or is this common? I have no clue, but in case it is the latter, here are half a dozen recent examples. For the young let it be a warning and for the old, perhaps consolation – if only that you are not falling apart as quickly as I am.
1 Those strange feelings about the weather
This is exactly the sort of thing I mean. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the other night as I was watching the weather forecast at the end of Newsnight alone in the living room, I had a weird feeling of melancholy as the map begins to move around and all the names of all those familiar places I have never been began to come and go on the screen. Lowestoft, Ullapool, Aberystwyth. .St Ives, Uttoxeter, Oswestry. It was a bit like the feeling you can get listening to shipping forecasts; all those people in all those places; the beauties and the pains.
I can rationalise this by thinking that the creeping sense of mortality is somehow comforted by small, permanent occurrences such as people in Stirling worrying that it might rain tomorrow. However, I suspect it is something different that I don’t understand. Perhaps I am suppressing a memory of something terrible that happened to me in a geography lesson.
2 Liking older women
Not in that way. Earlier this year, for reasons I will not go into, earlier this year I went to the Yorkshire Countrywomen’s Annual Luncheon. The attendees were mostly ladies between 50 and 80 years old. I had a great time, and in a half-past-two-champagne haze it struck me that most of them had more to say about life, and had far better manners, than any columnist currently writing for any British newspaper. I was even more convinced of it when I sobered up. I wished I could have told them in a way, but I am extremely glad I didn’t try.
3 Comparing my life with my dad’s
Does everyone have those moments when you realise you are the same age your dad was when he did something you remember? Or is this just me? The last time I went to see Leeds play, I found myself thinking, hmm, weird, I’m the same age my dad was when he brought me to Elland Road for the first time. Another time I realised I was the same age he was when he gave a memorable bollocking. The thing is, I work this out with a vague idea that it will give me some insight, or empathy with him. In fact it just makes him seem more distant.
4 Seeing politicians as bullies
I used to think political arguments were about right and wrong. Now I think most are motivated by a macho enjoyment of winning arguments. Actually, not even that; more the bully’s enjoyment of crushing people. More depressing than the expenses fiddling if you ask me.
5 Acknowledging my wife’s superiority
It’s funny what turns out to be a turning point isn’t it? One night a year or so ago my wife and I were for some reason talking about the Whole of the Moon by The Waterboys. I said it was a good song. She said it was a bad song. She said that in particular, the trumpets sounded terrible. You can hardly hear the trumpets, I said, you’re thinking of a different song. No I’m not, she said.
I ended up putting it on the stereo to show her. Of course she was right about the trumpets. But she was also right about the song; it wasn’t exactly bad, but it really didn’t as good as I remembered. I admitted this. It doesn’t matter, she said, you’re always convinced I’m wrong, but I often I turn out to be right. No, you’re wrong there, I was going to say – and then I realised. She was right. It’s quite embarrassing to admit that, but there you are.
In fact I think she understands most things better than I do, certainly everything to do with entertainment, and all practicalities such as mortgages, wi-fi connections and where to buy new cookers from. I hope this doesn’t sound like a sucking-up male guest on Loose Women going tch-aren’t-we-men-useless kind of a way that a might affect. I don’t mean that. I mean that for various reasons men often feel their choice has to be “right” rather than “a choice”, and realising your wife or partner is smarter than you helps you see the falsity of this. It sort of helps you to relax a little.
6 Thinking too much about this line in a book
This is going to sound like a pretentious reference, but at the beginning of Friedrich von Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom, he observes that sometimes, when our actions lead to the opposite of what we had intended to happen, we blame anything but ourselves. The point, of course, being that we might be inadvertently working to achieve the very opposite of what we desire, and unable to see what is looking us in the face. I read this when I was younger and didn’t understand it. Now it haunts my every waking hour.
In fact, if you’re still in you’re 20s and 30s and you want to know what being over 40 is like, that could be it. Certitude and confidence ebbing away while the awareness that age brings less, not more knowledge is borne on the tide like a ghost ship. It sounds bad, but it can be quite enriching really. At least that’s what I tell myself when the weather forecast ends, and I am left alone in the darkness, with the silence of a turned-off television and the faint sound of my wife and daughter’s breathing upstairs. So far I can just about believe it.
To be published in Manzine, Summer 2009