I lowered myself into my deckchair this morning outside the cottage, with a supply of books to keep me going through the prime tanning time of the day. Barely had I opened the first tome when my neighbours emerged and provided me with considerable more hilarity and interest than Erich Fromm was offering.
The forty-something male appeared and headed towards the garage, from which he emerged clad entirely in leather and pushing a distressingly green motorbike. He then proceeded to do, well, something with it - involved an awful lot of revving followed by an awful lot of cursing - and eventually threw his helmet aside and stormed indoors. The long-suffering wife persuaded him to have another go at whatever it was he was doing; the final conclusion was that the bike was clearly not cooperating and as he charged off in the car, she returned inside, slamming the door, shouting about 'that bloody bike'.
Led me to wondering if the mid-life crisis is a worldwide phenonemon, or just a rite of passage experienced by the priveleged members of the first world. For one, the age of 'mid life' changes significantly in some countries, and at the risk of causing offence I suggest it is improbable that the behaviour of a male in his early twenties is barely distinguishable from crisis-mode anyway. But seriously, do all - for example - American males go through this? Suddenly have a desire to launch themselves at terrifying speeds around the country on a bike they barely know how to handle? Or do they plunge shivering into the sea, armed with nothing more than a board as protection against the elements? What does a hell's angel do at this time - buy a semi and get a job?
It seems to me that these days, a man's entire life is a crisis. If you believe Freud, they spend the first portion of their life wanting to sleep with their mother, and the rest of their life being disappointed by the woman they married who doesn't live up to the standards set by his mother. At 25, they have the realisation that despite having a job that involves them working in London (or similar ghastly collection of buildings), wearing a suit and being transported daily around the bowels of the city by train, they are unattractive to all the women in their office because the 40 year old boss earns considerably more and can thus buy their affections. By 30, they're been convinced by someone to 'settle down and have kids', trapped into weekends of painting pictures with the aid of potatoes and trying to become enthusiastic about planting cucumbers. By 40, they realise that although they now have the money to get those women in the office they'd been gagging after when they were 25, they have no energy left after playing endless games of Monopoly, and having slept in a bed with the same woman for over ten years they've realised there is a finite number of feasible sexual positions and are subsequently bored with such activities. Even if they somehow engineered a situation when they were in bed with the gorgeous blonde secretary, chances of anything functioning as effectively as it did at the age of 25 are close to zero.
Thus they try to prove they are still young enough (they don't even fool themselves, let alone the world around them - particularly the women) and buy fast motorbikes that will either scare the bejesus out of them or, as in the case of my next door neighbour, will have a fault they have no idea how to fix but will never admit it as this would result in taking said bike to some whippersnapper in a garage to repair, thereby admitting they are Old.
Which all leads us to the purpose of Men in the world. In a nutshell: to provide endless entertainment to women, and the tools to keep the world stocked up with more women to pick up the pieces when men, as ever, Get It Wrong. Bless their cotton socks, eh.
(As an aside, this is the one hundredth post you have inflicted upon yourselves as readers. Oh, happy day).
