Mid-life crisis
Aidan Hartley Ihad an epiphany at 5.30 a.m. the other day in a Shanghai club packed with gangsters, prostitutes and flat-bellied Thai transsexuals. I watched a little guy, in his forties like me, dancing with two women dressed as schoolgirls. Then he collapsed drunkenly to the floor. White-jacketed attendants appeared. Instead of ejecting the man, they gently restored him to his tarts and whisky at the bar. His needs were understood. 'In Shanghai nobody that age had fun when they were young, before China reformed,' said a friend showing me the city. 'Now they have money, everybody's trying to have a good time before they're too old.'
I walked out of there deciding my mid-life crisis had begun. I have been in a crisis of one sort or another since prep school, but in several ways this state of emergency is different. For example, I notice how conversations with friends of my age increasingly celebrate our failures as much as our future hopes. We are embarking on what the novelist Edward St Aubyn calls 'the retreat from Moscow'. It's not over yet, but we know it's going to get messy.
St Aubyn also describes how one's midlife crisis follows patterns that are completely unoriginal. I have joined the club in which nubile females suddenly ignore me — and my ego is hurt by this however much I love my wife Claire. As a solution, a man my age might ask his spouse to put on a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes and flog him Oh dear, and I have nose hair. I spend my time worrying about my insides. I just had a full physical and the doctors made the preposterous claim there was nothing wrong with me!
I have begun to fret: how many more wars do I get to cover and is it irresponsible for me to go to Iraq? Should I buy a pair of Crocs? How many seasons have I got left to surf when I cannot even stand up on the board yet? Will I be able to climb Kilimanjaro with my kids Eve and Rider before 1) global warming melts all the tropical snow or 2) they are old enough to do it or I am too shagged to go?
Through the struggles of my adult life I've often felt like the self-loathing alcoholic captain played by John Mills in Ice Cold in Alex. Four soldiers are lost in a minefield in the Sahara and surrounded by the Afrika Korps, and he says, 'The next drink I have is going to be a lager. Ice-cold. There's a little bar in Alex ... They serve the best beer in all the Middle East. When we get through with this I'll buy you one.'
At the age of 421 have arrived in Alex and discovered I cannot drink lager any more because it has a bloating effect on my stomach. At this point I have a quiet little sob over my sufferings.
The crisis has deepened since we finished building the house on our upcountry Kenya farm. This has been such a Herculean struggle over the past three years that suddenly for it to be over leaves a terrible gap. You only build one home in your life. I can't remember who said that but if it is true then this adventure is over. I do not really know what to do with myself now that the cows are breeding, the trees are growing and smoke is coming out of the chimney 'Let's build a house on the beach,' Claire says. But I have had enough of building.
Life is going to be different, but on good days I feel as if nothing has altered at all. On the flight out of Nairobi yesterday I looked down at the city, a frenetic metropolis that is doubling in population every decade. Young Kenyans about to vote for the first time in this year's elections were born the same year that I first began reporting on the country's struggle for democracy. As we passed Kilimanjaro in clear skies — a little bit of snow left on top — and headed for the Indian Ocean town of Malindi where life moves at a slower, barefoot pace, our pilot said something that helped calm the raging storm within. 'No need to reset your watches,' he said. 'We're not changing time zones — even if it feels that way.'
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