Originally Posted by
Mr Utley
Middle age? It's a state of constant irritation
By Tom Utley
(Filed: 09/09/2005)
The average Briton, according to a survey published this week, believes that middle age begins at 49 and lasts until 65. God knows why anybody should find that interesting, but the University of Kent, which conducted the survey for Age Concern, seems to believe that we should. A little more interesting, in my view, is what exactly we mean by middle age - but that is a matter upon which the survey throws very little light.
When people speak of middle age, they are clearly not thinking of the onset of physical decay. For most of us, that begins much earlier than 49 (you don't come across many professional athletes in their forties, after all - or even in their thirties). It may be true that it is not until we nudge 50 that we start to become fully aware of the damage done by the years to our waists and hairlines, our eyesight, hearing and joints. But middle age, surely, is much more a state of mind than a physical condition.
I date the beginning of my dear elder brother's middle age to round about his 18th birthday, when he gave up a career in the theatre to become first a political agent for the Conservative Party and then a barrister. I like to think that I clung on to my youth rather longer, by which I mean that I was still behaving like an irresponsible student until I was well into my forties, staying up for most of the night and sleeping long into the day.
Even today, at 51, I much prefer sprawling on the floor like a teenager to sitting in an armchair - although getting up again afterwards is becoming more of an effort as the years roll by.
But I can no longer deny that I am middle-aged. Just lately, I have found myself in a state of more or less constant irritation with the world and its inhabitants, which is surely the defining mark of middle age. The smallest things set me off. For example, why has somebody in the pronunciation unit of the BBC decided that New Orleans should be pronounced "New Orleens", without so much as a hint of that antepenultimate "a"?
As a general principle, I am all in favour of anglicising foreign names - Reams for Rheims, Florence for Firenze etc. I well remember my late father rebuking me when I pronounced Marseilles the French way: "Marsay, boy? The word is Marsails. You don't say 'Paree', do you?" But, for reasons that I don't understand, New Orleens annoys me like mad, and I deliver a pompous speech to the television whenever I hear it. I snarl, too, every time Huw Edwards utters that patronising, folksy little "bye for now" after he has said that it is time to join our "news teams nationwide".
Come to think of it, almost everything on the television these days irritates me. I sit through hours of gameshows and makeover programmes for the sheer pleasure of being enraged by their banality. On the Tube platform in the morning, I curse when a voice comes over the public address system to announce, as it does every day: "Ladies and gentlemen, a good service is operating on the Jubilee line this morning." Every time I hear it, I think: "I'll be the judge of that." The other day, I heard myself saying it aloud, and got some very funny looks from my fellow commuters.
More annoying even than London Underground's boasts of running a good service was a message that a disembodied female voice kept repeating earlier in the summer: "Ladies and gentlemen, during the current spell of hot weather passengers are advised to carry a bottle of water at all times." Oh shut up, I kept thinking (although I hope I didn't say it aloud). I don't need a nanny any more.
Over the past few weeks, I have been fizzing with fury over those perfectly disgusting advertisements for Andrex Moistened, which have defaced even the hallowed pages of The Daily Telegraph. You know the ones I mean. They show photographs of young models' bums, with, superimposed on their underwear, the repulsive slogan "Could you be cleaner?" A couple of years ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about them. But now I find myself speechless with rage at the monstrous impertinence of that filthy-minded advertising copywriter, inviting me to muse at the breakfast table about how thoroughly I have wiped my bottom.
With every week that passes, my list of pet hates grows longer. "Your call is important to us"; silicone implants; "thank you for not smoking"; Charles Clarke; cold callers; Ann Widdecombe; "celebrity" anything; health and safety; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; "am I alone in thinking?"; work; the Australian interrogative inflection at the end of a statement; human rights; "for my sins"; James Blunt; "web page not found"; the Arts Council; "you're welcome"; David Blunkett; "perfectly good old-fashioned English word"; the Commission for Racial Equality; Dale Winton; media studies; "prestigious"; Patricia Hewitt; peanut butter; "so I was, like, 'whaddayamean?' "; oversized jeans that expose their wearers' underpants; the Animal Liberation Front; "in a very real sense"; teenagers who never hang up their towels after a bath; Hillary Clinton; very fat people who walk, very slowly, three abreast, along the narrowest pavements; happy-clappies; opening credits that keep flashing up on the screen, 20 minutes after the start of the film; silly surveys, claiming that the average Briton believes that middle age begins at 49 and ends at 65…
I have a friend who announced on his 40th birthday that, from then on, he would allow himself one Right-wing thought every day. That is another aspect of middle age: the older we get, on the whole, the less faith we put in the power of the state to right the nation's wrongs, and the more annoyed we become by the state's demands on us. By the year 2041, we were told this week, 37 per cent of the population will be over 60 - most of us, no doubt, ranting at our television sets and cursing the nanny state. There, perhaps, lies the Conservative Party's best hope of re-election.
What type of mouse do you use?
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