It’s October 2023. Monday 16th, to be precise, and the coldest morning of the emerging Autumn so far. I woke up this morning at 6.30am, to see my wife Sarah (SWK hereafter – a glossary of terms will doubtless emerge in the writing of this book, if I remember to put it in) off to a day’s work moving heavy scenery and other accoutrements of the theatre around, so that a performance of The King and I can shortly follow. She hates being cold, hates getting up in the morning even more than being cold, and she really really hates lugging great chunks of the theatre around (as would I, if I was “five foot nearly three” (her words) and was required to spend 14 hours doing hard physical work with a load of men 20 years younger and a foot taller than me). However, when she is not herself performing, this sort of thing is an excellent sideline (I refuse to call it a side hustle, as more modern correspondents might, because we are not Americans, or ‘grifters’). Whatever she thinks of it, it helps very much with the domestic finances, and the all-encompassing mission to finally have roughly enough money to go and seek out a more relaxed, if modest existence in a sunnier location. More on that will follow, in several months from now (don’t worry, I will endeavour to explain as we go along). Anyway, such work is one of the many strings to her extraordinary bow. In our ten years together, I have known her do all sorts of things, for varied sums of money including (amongst many other things) the following:
- Answering the phone at a Chinese Takeaway;
- Performing Murder Mysteries (in locations as far away and exotic as Peterborough);
- Making an exact copy of her own head;
- Designing and building sets for the theatre from scratch, in a leaking cow shed; and
- Performing for three weeks in the West End
She is cold and tired, today, but I am getting in early with a compliment in this book, as when she reads it, I want her to be reminded of how proud of her I am, and never more than when she does the work that she does, on days like this. She is awesome, and a force of nature, in entirely her own way. She’s never beaten by anything and is stronger than me. I do need to be nice to her, in these introductory lines, because I dedicated my first book to her (and our dogs), and to keep doing that would perhaps take sycophancy a degree too far. Well done, love – you are and you remain magnificent, despite the lack of a formal dedication to your magnificence, on this occasion.
I, meanwhile, am sat at my desk in our shared study, here at number 38. I started work at about 7.30am and have now run up against tasks that, frankly, I do not want to perform. So, as I do on these occasions, I have turned to fiddle for a bit with something that engages me rather more than my paid work does. Today’s form of engagement turns out to be an early strike on the prologue for my second book. I wrestled in my first book (Lunch in Moldova? published on Amazon in 2022) about whether or not an amateurish writer like me truly deserved to chuck about terms like Prologue, but I am over all that weedy introspection now. Consider yourselves quite thoroughly prologued. More prologue now follows.
My wife and I both suffer with the same affliction – we are extremely useful and obliging. Obviously, that is good thing, because if we were both useless and rude, then we would not have any work, and I would not be afforded the nice view I have this morning, across the woodpile to the treetops, rooftops, and pale cream sky of this chilly morning.
With that said, being instinctively useful and obliging is also a massive pain in the arse. To be consistently capable and affable and likely to do stuff for other people does not gather you plaudits, medals, parades of dancing girls or firework displays. No, it just gets you more of the same, I’m afraid. I have – we both have – learned this to be the case over many years. As one of those people who is not particularly amazing at any one thing, I seem to have had a working life of becoming passably effective at about a thousand different things. It follows that whatever the job I do now, it is generally composed of a thousand parts. Alright, yes, a thousand might be an exaggeration, but I don’t care because (if it was not already becoming clear) I AM HAVING A MOAN, safe in the knowledge you have presumably now bought this book and are settling into it, and are already hoping that I will cheer up a bit and tell you rather more about what’s going on here. With more jokes, ideally. Bear with me.
My moaning about the perils of being useful, agreeable and a ‘safe pair of hands’ actually speaks to the proposed content of this book – proposed, because I haven’t written any of it yet, or planned it out at all. Mad though it may seem, this book will (I imagine) be written precisely in the order in which the action plays out – action as yet entirely unknown to me. It’s going to be a sort of living memoir to this point of my middle age. Part diary, and part investigation into why I (think I) feel the discontented way that I do.
I have spent a lot of time, lately, wondering and worrying about the concept of the mid-life crisis. I’m not sure I have reached any definitive conclusions on the matter – the next 300 pages or so may very well sway me one way or another, I guess. I think that what is more common than the full-on ‘MLC’ is periodic feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration with one’s lot in life, which can strike at any time. Lots of us will observe this surge of mounting disappointment and frustration, swallow down in all its inevitability, and do nothing whatsoever to change the situation. Others (mostly men) will rashly divorce their spouse, pay for some sort of hair replacement therapy and dash off in an open-top sports car with a hastily and perhaps unwisely acquired new partner in an age bracket rather closer to their school days than their own. However, whilst I think the first scenario happens a lot, I think the second has become a caricature – and an amusing one, of course, for we like to laugh at ourselves, don’t we? Hmm.
Me, though? I’m somewhere in the middle, I think. I am outgoing, but cautious. Buoyant and verbosely humorous, but also given to being depressive and fatalist. I have an addict’s physiology, but the psychology of one who likes a lot of things in his life to be predictable. Plenty of contradictions to be observed, but overall, I am detecting a sea change in myself. I indulged the first sense of those changes in 2022, with the writing and editing and self-publication of my first book, along with the crippling run to the line at the Athens Marathon. I felt like I was missing out on things I wanted to do in life, so I made the time and took the effort to do two of them. Gold star for me.
It helped me, as the person living this life, to do those things – but there’s still something nagging away at me. I know I want to carry on writing, and amusing people (even if only myself, sometimes). I also know that I want to try to carry out a closer observation on what is going on in my life, and to discover in closer detail what is happening to me, here in the middle of it all, and perhaps then to clarify for myself whether or not a crisis is actually occurring, in some form or another. I might then know if there is anything to be done about anything that emerges. We’d all like to know if there was an oncoming vehicle in the wrong lane, as we go ‘round a blind bend, wouldn’t we? We would, acting on that knowledge, manoeuvre ourselves to safety. Such, perhaps, it is with the course of our lives. I daresay that I am actually beyond the halfway point in my life and might hope to have another 30-40 years to play with, but with the arrival of my 50th birthday on 21st February next year, it feels like a logical point at which to make this analysis and write another book. You’re most welcome.
I do continue to occasionally peck away at my first work of fiction, ‘Three Months Off’, but in all honesty, my life seems to be so busy with all the being helpful that I do, so utterly uncomplainingly, that I can never quite get a proper handle on it and find the necessary inspiration to drive it forward. One day, I will. Maybe. In any case, I was in the pub a few weeks ago with some friends of mine, relating what I thought the plot was likely to be, and my friend Rob rubbed his chin and said it “sounded a bit Ben Elton”, which rather took the wind from my sails, and prompted a bit of a rethink, as his throwaway remark was actually quite telling. One of the things I thought about was why I had proposed to write that book. The motivations that were guiding the action and the way the lead protagonist was behaving. It had a lot of me in it, which seems to be how I write best, at this point in my life. The stuff that was happening in the book was happening because the lead character was frustrated by his life and the world he inhabited, like me. However, he was about to go on to do something about it that I would never dream of doing, being a bit of a cowardly custard who is afraid of authority. No doubting it, though – the issues in those opening chapters were mine in real life, but I had hit a fictional full stop.
However, the overall desire to keep writing remained strong and hence this volume now follows. I have a lot of stuff I can still relate, from the more amusing and ridiculous moments of my existence so far, so I will drop in on some of those occasions for you as the book goes along. However, it’s not just going to be that – it’s not going to be another compendium. I am actually going to diarize for you my journey from 1 January 2024 and onwards into the year of turning 50. 51 days beforehand, the day itself, and the days thereafter. Not every day – some days I will be so utterly pissed off with my life that a humorous reflection on things will likely not be possible – but hopefully on other days it will be, and it will trigger some journeys into the past as well. On a number of days, nothing will, most likely, happen. We shall see. Look – stick with it, okay? View it as a shared challenge – I am committing myself to writing a book based on whatever happens for a year, in a hopefully entertaining way, investigating whatever crisis might perhaps be going on in my life and chucking in some long-forgotten anecdotes. You just drop me a fiver or a tenner for a copy and see if you can decipher it. Sound okay to you? If you have a paperback copy, I’ll even sign it – in the incredibly unlikely event I become a massively successful penner of bookly entertainments, you’d probably get your money back on Ebay with enough left over for some chips and a Panda Pop, in that odd shade of blue. We might even reach some shared conclusions, perhaps? Some about me, some about the oddities of the middle of one’s life as a general concept. Some about the general state of being human, and what it is to deal with one another, and accept the events of our lives. Again look, not to be tetchy, but I just don’t know. Read it and we’ll see, okay?
suggzy 