Beginning To Live Like An Old Man

Back in October 2007, when I turned 40, I noted that unlike the old saying 'life begins at 40', it seemed that the reverse was the case and you began to feel that your life was clearly running down towards its end:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/09/life-begins-to-end-at-40.html  Almost three years on, my prophecy seems to have been borne out.  In the last couple of months I have heard that officially 'middle age' runs from the age of 36 to the age of 59; after that you are 'elderly'.  Thus, I have actually been middle aged longer than I had realised back in 2007. It also appears that, on average, from the age of 41 your body generally starts to deteriorate.  This is no surprise really if you think that the average working man just a century ago had a life expectancy of 41 and a woman of 45.  If I had been 43 in 1911, then I would be an old man in my community.

This analysis has reassured me.  For the past year, if not longer, I have felt old.  Now I know that that should not be surprising, because by the measures of when my mother's father (a man I knew in his 70s and 80s) was a boy (he was born in 1900), I am in fact an old man.  There has been no sudden deterioration, but a steady accumulation of ailments (as opposed to diseases or even conditions) and with them a changed outlook on life.  Of course, I have suffered from diabetes for over twenty years and that is accelerating the decay of my body, but there are other aspects which seem to stem simply from ageing.  I think you can tell you are old when doctors say they can do nothing more for whatever mild condition you are suffering from. 

Two years ago my left knee swelled up; it was blamed on me carrying too much shopping (I invested in a shopping trolley as a consequence, adding to my sense of ageing) and all the creams I was offered have had no effect.  It is not painful, it is just still swollen and squidges when I kneel down.  My joints, limbs and other parts of my body now ache even if I happen to run a short distance, something it is hard to avoid when you have a 9-year old boy living in your house;  throwing a ball to him for 20 minutes left my right arm in pain the next day.  Cycling now leaves me nauseous and dizzy; travelling on an aeroplane leaves one ear and the skull around it in pain and me with partial deafness for days afterwards. Driving about 200Km is enough to leave my hands and calves aching for days after. Even one quick session of sex, with my established partner, with me on top, leaves my chest and arms aching as if I have been pressed under heavy stones.

My digestive system has suffered most.  I have become incredibly flatulent and also belch a great deal.  In the past few weeks constipation has come to give me a variant from very loose bowels, often ringed by haemorroids and faeces so large that they jam the toilet (I have to keep plumber's equipment by the toilet; no domestic version will work).  I have no appetite and very little taste, my tongue now being furrier by far than my head.  This has helped me loose weight as I always feel full, which I guess has to be a plus, because apparently from 41 onwards you naturally begin to become heavier.  Eating food is often not a pleasant experience, which is a shame as I used to really enjoy good food.  Now I can get heartburn even before I have eaten a mouthful and it gets worse as the food goes down.  I have been told this may be due to 'acid reflux' which means stomach acid now randomly decides to bubble up towards my throat.  Often after a meal no matter how small, it feels as if someone has jammed a stake with the diameter the size of my palm, between my lungs and then out through my back.  I had to abandon drinking coffee as doing so made swallowing every mouthful of food painful.

I guess a definition of old age is that you are no longer physically capable of doing the things you have always enjoyed, not least without paying the price in subsequent discomfort.  Mentally I am less active too.  My writing of fiction has dropped away severely as has my reading of any books.  Partly this has been due to a sustained period of unemployment, but nothing seems to be able to stimulate my interest again, even having got a job.  I struggle to concentrate to follow an 2-hour episode of 'Foyle's War'.  I must say, however, that my manner has improved, I get far less grumpy with bad drivers, lost documents and my computer going wrong.  That, however, may simply stem from the resignation of getting old: you know there is no point in getting angry as no-one will pay you any attention and you can change nothing.  One consolation is that I have lost important things right throughout my life and this does not seem to have increased now I am getting older, so I can probably cope with this far better than people coming to it anew.  My memory has deteriorated.  I know that I was never good at remembering names, foreign words or martial arts moves, but now I am finding that I am mis-remembering things.  Scenes I thought were in a particular movie turn out to be very different to how I remember them and buildings in very different places.  I am fortunate that my current girlfriend is far more forgiving of these flaws than her predecessor who was angered if I forgot even the tiniest detail she had mentioned once in passing.

Above all, I am very tired.  It goes beyond simply needing more sleep.  Like many people, in the past, I hoped that I would live to a certain age and see certain things or achieve certain things in my life.  However, now, I realise that if death came to me now and I had not read a particular book or had not visited a particular place then I would not feel disgruntled in the way I would have done a few days ago.  I certainly understand now how people see death as a rest.  However, I had a premonition that I will die aged 57, so I will have to hang around for a bit more yet, with more decay and ailments to put up with.

Other consolations for my physical and mental decay is that I am beginning to enjoy things that older people do.  My parents, madly, have become far more active in their old age than when my age.  My father now cycles 35-50 Km per week; my mother has joined a gym which she visits every week to work out in and walks 11 Km; they are both 73.  However, I have found I am enjoying more leisurely pursuits.  At the park with the 9-year old boy from my house, I found rather than playing with him, I got far more pleasure simply sitting on the bench and watching the activity around me.  I did not need any other physical or mental activity to be content.  

I accept that my medical condition has made my body older than my age would typically warrant.  I do worry that given I feel as if I am twenty to thirty years older than I am, how bad will I feel when I am actually 65.  It seems highly unlikely that I will be as active as my parents and in fact, by then, may simply be bedridden and ready for a nursing home.  In some ways, though, in contrast to two or three years ago, my mind seems to have caught up with my body and that is a great relief.  It would be incredibly frustrating if I still had the desire to travel or start up new things only to find my body was constantly complaining.  I am glad I have found the contentment to fit with the age of my body and that now, I can quite happily sit and watch life go by.

Being 'Past It'

I have commented before about how having become 40 in the past year, I realised that all the things people said about this phase of your life were lies. Life does not 'begin' at 40, in fact so many things that had been open to you in previous years are now shut off. In the UK it becomes far harder to get a job when you pass 40 and you are more likely to be the one who is made redundant when there are cutbacks. Unlike in some cultures, experience is not valued in UK business, rather low salaries and malleability are those things that are the most rated.

As you are growing up you soon learn that the doors close behind you pretty quickly as you age. A school-aged child soon learns that they are now unable to go in the part of the park reserved for toddlers or sit around all day watching CBeebies and having a snooze in the afternoon. This is particularly the case in the UK where children now typically start school at 4 (compared to 5 when I began and 6 even now in Sweden and South Africa) and by the time they are 7 they are sitting their first exams. It is ironic that maturation of children is now accelerated in the UK by this country's (or certainly its government's) desperate need to monitor everything and yet, juvenalisation of adults continues.

We sort of freeze our children at 11-14 constantly sitting exams but never taking on any responsibility and being ferried around by their parents. Hence people in their 20s and 30s take on minimal responsibility for their health or their behaviour, so we have binge drinking and an unwillingness to recognise the consequences of your actions or make any effort to change them or society. This is a society in which our parents now take responsibility for us until they die.

Anyway, as we pass through life the doors are always closing behind us, but in exchange we get given new things. Okay, so now I have to go to school but I have a big group of friends and find out new things and go on trips and so on. So now school has finished and my life lacks structure and direction, but I can drink alcohol and take drugs and have sex without too much hassle and so on.

People are very aware of these stages, despite the fact that in the UK we have long lacked proper rites of passage which make it difficult to see these change. I think we should have a civil version of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah (the female equivalent) which comes around 13 and there is a recognition that the child is coming into adulthood and importantly, that they now put aside childish things. Such rhetoric is part of Christianity but the British Christian churches (despite the increase in popularity of their schools) seem to wash their hands even more of the role of maturing young people than they have in the past. Sorry, we are moving off into a whole new topic.


Back to the point, despite the British lack of rites of passage people are quite sharply aware of these steps, as I am here with being 40. When you become 30 you look around at/think back to how many of your contemporaries got married. I attended 6 weddings the year I turned 30. I felt it was like the party game musical chairs, i.e. when the music stops drop down on the nearest chair or you miss out. In many cases people marrying at that stage just seemed to have plumped for whoever was convenient, because otherwise they would miss the vital date. No-one saw me as a suitable candidate, perhaps because at that stage I was dating women either 2 years older than me or 7 years younger and I never anticipated being married myself even if they had been willing. In the former case she wanted a husband taller than her, rather than the same height (6'0") which I am; she did find him.


When you turn 40 you lose so much, as I outline in this posting, but there is nothing you are offered in exchange, there is nothing new that you are able to do or access. You have the same worries as you had at 35 but fewer opportunities to counter-balance them, no wonder we hit 'mid-life crisis'. The only thing to look forward in my life now is retirement. At a minimum that is 25 years away and more likely given population changes and economic needs, 30 years away. In addition, retirement is no longer the time when you can sit back and relax and enjoy hobbies.  Instead the financial restraints, the number of pension funds that have been raided by companies, means, actually, it is the time when you drop into poverty.

So, the next big milestone for me, like millions of other Britons, is going to be even worse than this one. My father, now 70 himself, once mooted why more pensioners do not take hard drugs. They have nothing to live for except dying when they can no longer afford to pay the fuel bills, so, he suggested, why now go out in a heroin-induced haze at 66? He is of the generation with good pensions and good health so is enjoying travel and exercising, reading, eating out, all those things that will be denied my generation as we fight each other to try to secure that job collecting up the shopping trolleys at Tescos so we can afford to have a single heater on in our homes.This is jumping forward in time a bit, let us come back to the situation for me now. In recent weeks other things have re-emphasised to me how I have passed a point of no return. Two colleagues in the wider business that I have tried contacting, have turned out to be on maternity leave, one with her first child, one with her second. Both of them are in their late twenties, but with lots of time to produce the three children which seems to be the standard number for middle class British families these days. I know, as a man, I can keep on producing children until I am in my 70s, but female contemporaries of mine are very unlikely to be able to do so. So, if I entered a long-term relationship now then there would be no children out of it.

As it is, for me, the age of relationships seems passed. This was re-emphasised by another colleague, a newcomer to the company, working as a PA. Initially she dressed in a low-key almost, dour way, but in the past week her wardrobe has changed to over-the-knee boots, shrugs and short dresses and her hairstyle from a simple ponytail to elaborate tresses. The mumbled conversations on the telephone in the office, with her back turned to the door, suggest that a relationship is afoot which has provoked her changed style. There is no way I can envisage, at my age, provoking such a reaction in a woman these days, let alone actually starting a new relationship. From men I know, a decade or so older than me, I am aware that even if you can get a woman to go out with you she is simply interesed in a platonic relationship and any steps towards anything physical, however mild, ends the relationship immediately.


Of course, the women out there of my age are unlikely to be particularly enthralling. Recently I stumbled across an online discussion about making Easter gardens, by a woman I had known at university. At that time I knew her, she had been incredibly sweet but also sexy. As I have recounted before, I completely bungled any relationship with her, something I had regretted up until now. However, reading the discussion about such a mundane issue on a website group for Christian mothers, I did think, well, even if we had hit it off, then no doubt this would be the kind of woman I would be married to now, and my life would be no better than it is for me anyway.

I suppose we all turn into our parents. For me that is a particularly unpleasant phenomenon and I shudder when I hear my father's expressions in things I say as I would loath to be ever as mean spirited and have such a violent temper as him. However, what I am saying here, is maybe we cannot escape that development. At best, we can only be incrementally different to our parents, despite how we may appear in our 20s. To discover the sweet and sexy woman has mutated into a Christian mother and an expert on Easter gardens reveals that it can even happen to those you do not expect it from.


The other thing is health. Compared to even just five years ago when I would spring from bed and cycle to work I am now in a situation in which getting up in the mornings is a long and painful process. My joints seem to hurt constantly and lethargy is also a constant companion. It does not matter how early I go to bed, I still wake exhausted. Even a light meal leaves me bloated and without appetite; nothing seems to have flavour. All my faculties seem to be crumbling away rapidly. I already take seven medicines each day and a varying number to counter their side effects. I still have 25 years of working life, if not more, as the working age is liable to rise in that time, what is it going to be like trying to get ready for work when I am 65 if it is already so tough now?


Life does seem incredibly tedious. By the time you reach 40 there is nothing unexpected left. You have a very jaded attitude to things. Nothing is stimulating, it is simply tedious. I suppose we know too well how expensive everything costs. Travel and holidays are too expensive to consider and anyway, you know all the things that are going to go wrong at the airport, with your luggage, with the hotel, with the food, with thieves, etc., etc. Exotic places seem simply to hold hazard, expense and trouble and prove to be more of a burden than if you simply sat at home. Even going to Belgium and to Bath, hardly exotic in anyone's view, proved to be a series of problems and expense. It is not that I am jaded from having seen and done too much, in fact the reverse.

The 1990s were probably my decade of opportunity, I was aged between 23-33. However, I earned £5408 (€6,814; US$9,626) per year at the start of the decade and £9500 (€12,065; US$16,910) at the end and, of course, that was with UK high prices on food, clothes and rent. I had three holidays in the 1990s: one week on a canal boat in the Midlands, one week in a house in France and two weeks cycling between cheap hotels in France, that was it. I did not experience any of the changes in Eastern Europe or go to India or anything. Of course if I had tried, no doubt I would have had all my belongings stolen or I would have been killed or caught some terrible disease. This sort of thing is going to be very common for people who have just left university this year and have thousands of pounds of debt.

Due to the difficulty of finding work, I was a little ahead of my time. British young people today are being constrained into the kind of dull life that I experienced even before they turn 40 and they will envy their European counterparts who at least have a little more ability to experience something different. My brother's wife is about to have a baby in Belgium and I can tell now that his/her life will be far more interesting than that of the 6-year old living in my house who will never go to university and will probably be shot dead in Iran or Syria as part of a British invasion force 12 years from now. The same applies to that boy's cousin just about to be born, though, given how repressive his parents already are, his grim life will start from the moment he sees daylight.


I know I am 'past it' as the popular British phrase says. I have got as far in my career as I will ever get. I have had all the relationships and all the travel that I will ever have. My income will decline from now on and my life will be grey and plagued by ill-health. Of course, anyone over 40 knows all this. However, this message is to anyone who is under 40, even if you are 35: get out there, spend and travel as much as you can, have as much sex and alcohol as you can get. There is no future. You have another forty or fifty years once you turn 40 and the greyness of those years will seek to erase any excitement that you might have had up to then, so you must build up an excellent resource of thrilling memories.

Do not believe the lie, life does not begin at 40, it begins its agonisingly slow descent to death. I suppose I am fortunate. I was told back in the 1980s that I had a life expectacy of 51. I have had premonitions, surprisingly precise ones, that I will die in a car fire in Spain in 2024 when I am 57. The premonitions suggest my father will die in 2020 at the age of 83 and my mother, 8 years later, at the age of 90. So they will have had a good 'innings' as us Britons describe it and I should only have to bear the next 11-17 years. Looking at it that way, however, it seems like ages. So, anyway, do not be like me, heed my warning, and live an interesting life before the greyness subsumes you.

Unemployment as the Whip

At the end of the Second World War there was obviously a concern not to return to the mass unemployment of the 1930s, partly this was because it was blamed for aiding the rise of Nazism in Germany that had led to the war breaking out. In addition right across Europe by 1938 there were very few democracies left and even if they had not become as extreme as Nazi Germany, most Europeans were under the rule of a dictator in a society that was authoritarian and discriminatory on grounds of race and religion. There was also a fear in 1945 of a repeat of what had happened 1919-21 with the end of the war and the return of demobilised troops leading to unemployment that was hard to decrease before the really bad levels that followed in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in 1929.

In the UK in 1945, under a Labour Government, and even before then when civil servants had started thinking about the post-war economy, one issue was how far the UK could get to full employment. It was believed that Keynesian economics which had begun to be experimented with in the UK from the 1941 budget onwards could get the UK in a better shape in terms of unemployment. There was a great deal of debate about how high unemployment should be kept at, because it was feared that if everyone had a job then there would be no incentive for workers to work hard and they could effectively blackmail employers for higher wages. So it was believed that to achieve flexibility in the economy that unemployment should be somewhere between 3%-8% of the working population with left-wingers favouring the lower figure and the right-wingers the higher level.

In fact as it turned out, injections of US capital through Marshall Aid from 1948 onwards and the demands of reconstruction and then the various wars of the Cold War, combined with cheap oil kept unemployment low right until the mid-1970s and really there was no need for Keynesian economics. By the time they were tried in 1976, the world had become so used to not using deficit finance, and to a more stable budget pattern that such an approach was seen as unacceptable and the UK began to go into its highest levels of unemployment since the 1930s. This was not helped by the Thatcher government's privatisation of nationalised industries which then cut cost and the strict monetarist policies which exacerbated the shift from manufacturing to service dominance of the UK policy. There was also an increasing maldistribution of wealth as salaries of the richest pulled away further from the bulk of the working population. This in fact reduced consumption in the economy and millions of poor people actually consume a great deal more than a few rich people and so even the service sector did not prosper. The vigorous encouragement for people to buy rather than rent property also increased frictional unemployment as it made it far harder to move to a new area to find work, especially with the sharp disparaties between (not only in terms of housing but also food and other essentials) prices in different parts of the UK. Official OECD figures put UK unemployment in the mid 1980s at around 3.6 million, it was probably in fact over 4 million out of a working population of somewhere around 22-25 million. It also concealed all of those in part-time, insecure low paid jobs.

Unemployment now in the UK is around 1.65 million people out of a working population of 29 million, so 5.7%. We use ILO figures much more these days than simply counting the people who are claiming benefit was was the case in the 1980s and which actually excluded lots of people seeking work (such as married women whose husband worked, people between the ages of 55-65, etc.). The right-wing press, notably 'The Daily Mail' still complains that there are too many economically inactive people, they claim 7.95 million who they seem to condemn as being unwilling to contribute to the economy and thus should be chasitised. In fact of these 1.89 million are students, the bulk of whom work to pay their way through university and college given the high costs of study. They often take the low paid casual jobs that anyone supporting a family could not live on. Also it is still the case that the more someone studies the more they rise their income. Universities also generate a lot of wealth and in some areas are now the main industry of the town, often employing 3-5000 staff who contribute. Portsmouth claims that even just visits by parents of students who are studying in the city, bring £26 million per year into the economy, let alone what the students and university staff spend themselves. So I would hardly call students economically inactive. These days may go on placements into companies as part of their studies and so form an educated free labour force for part of the year.

Of the economically inactive, 2.35 million are either caring for elderly relatives or for children. Mothers are now condemned as 'stay-at-home' mothers. The thing is the policy of the Blair government and the Conservative ones that preceded it was that having mothers at home was a good thing to be encouraged but at the same time they should also go out to work. This contradictory policy has never been reconciled in the past 30 years in the UK so mothers are attacked from both directions. It is seen as alright for them to stay at home as long as they do not claim benefits. Women in the workplace still earn 17% less than a man in the same post, so where is the incentive to go out and be criticised for not looking after your child when you are going to get paid less. Mothers at home save the state millions of pounds. Private childcare is beyond the reach of most parents in terms of cost so to bring more mothers into the workforce would need a huge increase in cheap nursery places probably supplied by the state. The same goes for carers of the elderly and the disabled. The Thatcher government ran down many long-term care institutions to save money and forced 'care in the community' on the population. Scotland has reintroduced some of the provision for elderly people, England has not. Again, then, these carers might not be economically active, but they are effectively saving the state millions of pounds in the care it would be obliged to provide.

Apparently 619,000 people have retired early. Now, given that unemployment is 1.65 million, if these people were still in the workforce you would actually raise unemployment by 36%. These people tend not to be a burden on society and they are consumers so stimulating the economy. It seems perverse to want them back in the workforce in the place of younger people. By definition people who have retired early do not need to work to earn an income, so why should they not yield their place to those who need a job to support their family? It seems ridiculous to concern ourselves about the early retired they are a benefit not a burden to the economy. We were all encouraged during the 1980s to make millions and retire at 30, so is it any surprise that many people have done that? Again it seems like a contradictory policy. Conservatives want it both ways, it is a very old-fashioned attitude that is reminiscent of the 19th century attitudes of Non-Conformist denominations, that somehow it is sinful not to be working and those who do not work are guilty of committing an offence. We are long passed such attitudes and also to cling on to them suggests we put no value on study or caring.

There are people in the economy who do not want to work, these are the 34,000 termed 'discouraged workers'. Interestingly this figure is almost exactly the same as the number in the 1960s despite the increase in the size of the population. The question is would you want to employ such a person anyway? It is clear that such people are a smaller percentage of the population than they were, say, in 1968 and the number does not necessarily mean it is the same 34,000 people as some will drift in and out of this category as economic pressures dictate. If you think of the homeless people in the UK, of those with mental conditions who have been pushed out from institutions and so on, then this figure actually seems quite low, representing 0.12% of the total working population, actually probably lower than those people who are economically active but making their income from crime and probably scooped up in the 3.75 million people described as self-employed and lionised by the right-wing press!

The other neglected sector is the under-employed, those people who want a full-time permanent job but can only get temporary or seasonal work with very little security or rights. When I lived in East London, this characterised the employment of literally hundreds of people in any given street. When the minimum wage came in many doubled or tripled their weekly income though they had no access to the employment rights that should be taken for granted and in many cases their employers were scooping back their wages through introducing various charges and most often through not paying the national insurance contributions. In some parts of the UK, this grey economy which has legitimate businesses behaving in illegitimate ways is terribly common as the bulk of the employees have no other option bar crime or going back on state benefits. Contrary to the portrayal of the bulk of the population, the large majority of people hate to subsist on handouts and will go out of their way to get a scummy job with no rights, long hours and low pay rather than stay on benefits. However, such jobs do not pay enough and you are at risk of losing them on the whim of the employer. Tax credits have helped for those in such situations with families, but if you lose the job they stop too and you are back to benefits, constantly flickering between the two states.

Why have I got on to unemployment today? It is not because new figures are out, it was stimulated by a report (reported in 'The Guardian' on Saturday) that employers are complaining that people under the age of 40 lack the experience of mass unemployment (you could argue those under 34 as if you are 34 now, you were 16 in 1990) and so do not work hard enough as they have insufficient fear of losing their jobs. This goes back to the thoughts at the end of the Second World War about how much unemployment was needed to prick people into accepting low-paid work. No-one seems to realise that a worker who is in fear of unemployment is not an efficient worker. I am in this situation at the moment. I am likely to be unemployed from August 2009 onwards and yet I am already in fear that I will lose my house and other things despite their being a year to go. I am 40 so maybe I have that fear of the Thatcherite years still lodged in my brain. The effect is though that the fear of unemployment is causing sleepless nights and utter despair. I feel there is little point in putting in any effort to a job I will not see out. I am refusing to start projects that I know I will not see the end of. It causes arguments with my housemate and my family. Is this the kind of situation we want for younger people to be in terror all the time?

The thing about being threatened with unemployment is that it breaks any common interest between you and your employer. I have seen this happen so many times. In the past year two women who knew they were going to be layed off at my work (by a very bullying very misogynistic boss) simply stopped working, minutes were not typed up, things were not filed, they left everything in a mess because they no longer felt any obligation to the boss who had treated them so shabbily. Such fear stunts initiative. I have no incentive to start new things or even make suggestions on how to improve them. There is no point in me receiving training; there is no point going for promotion to work for the employer I will be parting company with so very soon. Fear of unemployment does not make people work harder, it instead quickly leads them to draw in and work less effectively. The hardest workers are those who are valued and feel they have a future in the company they are working in. Employers tend to see their workers simply as a resource like they electricity or raw materials, they forget that workers engage emotionally in their workplace as often the spend more time there awake than they do with their families.

One thing that the employers overlooked about people under the age of 40 is that they tend to view their life as much more changeable. They tend not to have mortgages or families, especially these days when people are leaving (or being forced by the economy) to leave buying a house or raising children until much later in their life. In addition, the age at which it is seen right to do certain things has shifted greatly. In my youth, you were deemed to be entering middle age at the age of 40. These days people in their early 40s carry out the kinds of activities that would have been done by 25-year olds in my youth. A colleague of mine in her 50s water-skiied for the first time last week and another who is in her mid-40s regularly goes scuba diving in tropical waters. Back in the 1970s these women would not think of doing such thing. Despite British people being pretty unadventurous when compared say to their French or Australian counterparts we are all constantly encouraged to get 'out there' travel and experience life. Given this context it is unsurprising that people under 40 are not keen to keep their heads down and work solidly at a job particularly when (in contrast to in the 1950s and 1960s) there is no guarantee that they will not be dropped with minimal notice and minimal redundancy pay. Commitment is two-way and employers cannot whine that their employers make no commitment to the business when the employers make it clear they are making no commitment to the workers.

This leads on to the other complaint from employers that workers under 40 see going to work as an extension of their social life. If employers have suddenly discovered this then they have been blind about employee behaviour for decades. In terms of marriages in the UK, 40% are between people who met at work and this figure has continued to be the case for decades even if the level of marriages (climbing again) has fluctuated. This does not take into account the other relationships and friendships established at work and often promoted by employers through 'team building'. Again employers' expectations are unrealistic if they think they can have their employees working as a team and not for social contact to develop. The shift has been in terms of the media used for the contact. People do not stand around the 'water cooler' as they used to and far fewer gather in the smoking room and many workplaces no longer have a canteen where people socialise. A decade ago people complained that employees used the telephone to talk to friends and relatives now of course they email or text or instant message. This makes it more visible to some employers and in fact more in their control as many now block the usage of such websites through work machines. Another factor is now that we are all service sector workers it is much easier than if you are bellowing across to your colleague standing the other side of a production line. However, I bet if you measured how much time spend socialising at work now and compare it to 1958 or 1978 or 1998 you would find the time would be pretty much the same.

Thus, unemployment is still seen as the necessary whip in the UK to get a higher level of work out of employees. The fact that we work longer hours and have fewer holidays than our European colleagues is not factored into this at all. Fear, despite what employers think, does not make people work harder, it makes them work less efficiently. Society has changed and so have our expectations but people who feel happy and above all secure in their job work hard and make sacrifices for their employer. People who feel they are simply a disposable commodity and are threatened to make them work harder are not going to do. To get a good return on people you have to invest in them as you invest in the other aspects of your business. Of course as in so many facets of British business there is under-investment in this aspect as well as many others and so companies see the consequences of their policies.

Countering the View that We All Have the Potential to Learn Everything

At this time of year when people are trying to carry out new year's resolutions you often see advertisments for foreign language courses saying something like 'in just x months you can be speaking y confidently'. The implication is that anyone who buys the course will be able to develop a reasonable grasp of the language. My experiences suggests that that is not at all the case and everyone should tread a little carefully before parting with their money. I have just abandoned my evening classes in Chinese which I have been doing since September. My company has increasing links with various parts of China and it seemed sensible that I learn the language so I could be polite to visitors and not be completely lost if the company sends me out there. I find it challenging to learn alone so signed up for a face-to-face class with an enthusiastic teacher and students. A couple of them were older than me but most were in their 20s and I should have realised I was going to be facing problems when all the older students left throughout the early weeks. However, I will always give things ago and not abandon them quickly.

The reason I have abandoned the course is that a week before the exam my grades have slipped very badly. At first I was getting over 70% which I thought was reasonable given this was a beginners' course. Even when I did the listening comprehension with flu I scored 64%. However, I realise this was just a 'honeymoon period' and this week I was unable to scrape more than 5% in two written exercises (despite having spent hours over last weekend revising this particular aspect) and only got 48% for the oral part (40% is the pass mark). It is clear that I have the capacity for a few words and phrases of Chinese but nothing more. The teacher of course, in line with the usual attitude that if you try hard enough you can succeed. No, that is not true, each of us has mental and physical capacities which we cannot exceed and these deteriorate rapidly after we turn 30. I remember reading a comment in which a man said (bizarrely) that you know when you are still young when if someone wiped out your family you could go to a remote monastery, train in martial arts and come back and avenge them. By the time you pass 30 you are the one who stands on the sidelines as some hero comes in and does the avenging. Unfortunately for me that is what is likely to happen in my company environment now that I know I will never have even a child's grasp of Chinese.

I am not a person to give up easily, but as I look back on my life, it is not so much with a sense of shame, as with growing humility (and maybe a more realistic outlook on my abilities). When my father was at school in the 1950s, if a child was no good at something s/he was told outright. Being educated in the more woolly 1970s there was a step away from that, I think partly with the general move in the UK of schools away from the so-called 11-Plus exam which segregated children for life by ability at the age of 11 (ability was not the only factor, the number of children who got to the higher class 'grammar schools' depended on how many places there were in the district so in one area with many grammar schools you could get in with a much lower mark than you would need in an area with only one grammar school. Given that these schools were often single-sex, there was often also an imbalance for boys and girls) towards the comprehensive school system (which covers the bulk of the country, bar Kent and Buckinghamshire, but is now under attack from more school selection processes). As a result we were all told that we could all achieve anything we wanted. Having that lesson pressed into us from the age of 5 through to even 21 at university, it is difficult to shake, but my life has proven that it was a lie.

So what have I signed up to, to find that I was incapable of getting anywhere:

Aikido, I studied this for 12 years at 4 different clubs each with a different approach because I moved around the country. I saw people achieving black belts after 3 years and for my 12 years of effort what was I? A yellow belt, the one just off the bottom and I have the suspicion that one club just gave that to me because I turned up every week and they felt sorry for me.

Canoeing, I tried canoeing and embarrassment there was quicker as they would not permit me to join the club as I did so badly in the lessons. Again it was portrayed as a sport that all can do and after 6 weeks of almost drowning as I could not lift my head from the water one week and legs covered with bruises it was deemed that I was too much of a hazard (I almost ran over a scuba diver training in the same location) which did not help.

Fencing, I thought well, if I cannot do the intricacies of Aikido maybe something a little more straightforward would be better. I did fencing for 2 years and had reached the level of ability when a woman 20 years older than me could hit me in the same precise spot 6 times out of 10 (causing a very painful bruise on that spot). Again, even people older than me passed me into competing in competitions. Again the sport had suggested that it could be done by anyone with average fitness and I was not seeking to be world champion or even just district champion, but as with Aikido it became apparent that I could not attain a level good enough to function effectively at the club (this is effectively what happened in Chinese, I was so below the ability of the other students that I could not do conversation or pair work exercises with them).

Go, you can see an Oriental theme developing here. I have always been interested by games from around the world, but despite reading about them, generally I am poor at them (the 6-year old son of my housemate is almost at the level he can beat me at chess; he develops his structures too slowly, otherwise he would win, given how easily he puts pins and forks on my pieces). I thought Go would be an interesting, elegant game. One trouble was that in the club most of the members were of high level, one was also a Master (the level below the better-known Grandmaster rank) in chess already and the other players competed at national level. However, you would think that this meant some of them would be good teachers, especially as at least one of them worked for a local university. One week (by fluke it seems) I almost defeated the head of the club, so I was confident that for once I was actually improving. I had been playing at the club for 2 years by then. When I commented to another of the skilled players that I felt that I was actually improving, he said I was deluded, it was just that they had stopped beating me so comprehensively so that I continued to come and pay my club fee, and that in fact I was not better then than when I had first started. Of course, I left.

So, physically and mentally it is clear that I should be very suspicious when anyone advertises anything as being something that anyone can learn. I know that it is in their interests not to be honest about the fact that most people will get nowhere as they need members/students and the money they bring. There are people out there who can do these things. As I have said, I have seen people in a matter of months get to a national level. However, I think these people are rare. I have known people who can grasp languages quickly. In the 1980s I met a (British) man who spoke every language in Eastern Europe and said his Hungarian was poor but them demonstrated his knowledge of poetry rhythms in that language, something the bulk of us could not do even in our own language let alone one were are 'poor' at. He went off to lecture in China. In the 1990s I knew for a time a man (again British which counters my point made in an earlier posting that the British cannot do languages, but maybe these exceptions prove the rule) who taught himself Korean. He bought one of these book-and-CD (in those days it might have still been cassette) kits through the post and proceeded to teach himself Korean. It was interesting that when he got to the cassette for Part 4 (the final section of the course) he found it was identical to the cassette for Part 3 and it was clear that the company had been sending out the wrong cassette for quite a while but clearly no-one had ever got to the final stage to find out the error. He ended up keeping his diary in Korean and the last I heard he had moved to Seoul, had married and had two daughters.

So, there are people out there who can achieve these things, but I think they are a tiny fraction of the UK population. Whilst I would never want to dim the dreams of young people, and I know from friends that poor performance at school does not bar you from success or from picking up subjects later (one issue about sending children to school so early in the UK and making them choose which pathways they want to take at 14 or even 11, is that some people have no idea of their strengths at that age and only find them when they become adults) and the UK is good for adult learning, I do think we need to present a realistic picture of people's abilities to them. It is not healthy to keep saying to people, in a very American way 'you can achieve anything you want to achieve', just look at the USA to see how that is not the case even in the 'Land of Opportunity'.

In particular as is becoming apparent to me, abilities do deteriorate quickly and even if it is accurate to say to a 20-year old that they can achieve big things if they try, this is no longer true at 40, let alone 50 or 60. By the time you reach stage you have to be given the attitude of a woman I worked with who joined a gymnastics club in her mid-20s and they told her bluntly that she would never achieve anything more than she had achieved as a child doing gymnastics. That principle should be emblazoned on every club or course brochure.

Why is it important to have a realistic appreciation of our capabilities and the level they have deteriorated to? It is because 'humility' and 'humiliation' come from the same source. I have learnt that humility this week, that I cannot achieve what a 20-year old student can achieve, but it comes at the price of humiliation and I feel completely useless this week. That is one reason why I blog, to cast off the bits of lead from my life and also hopefully this will be a warning to myself when I am tempted to sign up to a course promising me a new skill.

If This Is The Start Of The Rest Of My Life Why Should I Bother?

As readers of this blog will know I turned 40 in 2007 and have really been feeling my age. It seems to be getting far worse. I accept that I had had many health problems in my life, but it is the difficulty of getting through an ordinary day. Today was no exception and I am not (I was about to say 'I am lucky not to even be back at work yet' but given how mad I am going sitting at home, maybe 'lucky' is the wrong word), even back at work yet. I found it almost impossible to drag myself out of bed today and walked around the supermarket as if I was a zombie. I have slept the bulk of the afternoon away and feel no better; just incredibly lethargic. I tried playing a computer game with a 6-year old who was keen to have a human partner and was utterly humiliated, I could not get any of my forces even in range of his and many of them died even without me having fired a shot. He did not even have to attack me in order to win and even started shooting his own men in an attempt to try and balance the game for me. It was not that I lost badly or even lost, it was that I could not even engage in the game sufficiently to even give him an easy challenge. I know children assume adults can do anything they can do but better when in fact, especially with anything computer-based they are far better and this proved the case. However, it did seem to emphasise to me how irrelevant I am in the world of the late 2000s. My memory is deteriorating quickly, I now meet people I have no memory of though they reveal I have spoken with them at length just days before; I forget names and faces and even worse tell people things they have actually told me in the first place. If I feel this bad when I have no obvious symptoms - I am not suffering a cold or flu, I have had no accidents or anything else that signals a problem, I am simply lacking in energy and my body is still in various places (my knees in particular ache, but I have heard that becomes common for most men beyond the age of 30). I am not overweight, in fact I lost a lot of weight before Christmas due to the fortnight of moving heavy boxes and furniture up and downstairs. So, I can only think it must be down to old age. If I was a caveman I would be elderly by now; even in 1900 the average life expectancy of a worker was only 45, so maybe we just keep ourselves alive artificially long periods these days. I feel like the Struldbruggs in 'Gulliver's Travels' the people of Luggnagg who are immortal, but their faculties deteriorate over time so the bulk of them are blind and deaf and all are entirely bored, desperate for something new in their lives. I also suffer that and find no interest in books and television, let alone the computer.

What worries me is, if I feel this bad now at 40, what is it going to be like if I live to 60? Do I face two decades of dragging my increasingly debilitated body around; bored out of my mind and unable to interact with the increasingly complex computer-focused world of the 2010s and 2020s, let alone to make a worthwhile contribution to it? What if the young people I meet only use systems that I cannot even press the correct buttons to access? Will I be cut out of forms of communication. Clearly one fear, with my work contract expiring in 2009, is that I will find it difficult to get a job now and that I face another 25 years on unemployment and other benefits, being pressured to retrain myself so that I can get a 'McJob' though of course unless I am behind the scenes all these problems of communication will continue and in any post the lethargy which seems to be taking me will still hamper my work. So it is likely that I face 25 years at lower wages than at present before sliding into poverty when I retire. In the UK many people fall one or two or more social classes on retirement. This is as measured by the census which has 8 social categories with '8' being the 'underclass' of homeless people; on retirement people in categories 3 or 4 will commonly drop from category to 5, 6 or even 7 because of the fall in income and status; something exacerbated by chief executives of companies running off with pension funds. People in categories 1 and 2 are in that bracket where they are sufficiently wealthy that they can ignore the normal rules of society. The end of so many company pension schemes in the UK and the poor performance and mis-selling of so many private schemes means lots of working and middle class UK people will be in poverty in old age.

I had intended to end my life in August 2007 ahead of my 40th birthday in October and was dissuaded by my housemates. However, increasingly it seems to have been a mistake and it is something I need to rethink as I have no desire to face another two decades of feeling as bad as this and being slowly day-by-day being demonstrated that I am of no use to society and in fact lack the abilities to properly engage with what it requires. I am no rich now but falling into even tighter financial straits is not an attractive proposition and is something which is liable to start from 2009 onwards. I did say that I was going to avoid making this blog a journal of my deterioration, but being a 40-year old in the UK today it seems impossible to avoid it. Hopefully there will not be many months left in which I can experience the humiliation and discomfort of being a middle aged British person alive in 2008.

Life Begins to End at 40

As I have noted in previous postings I turn 40 in October. As with most men this is something that preys on my mind a great deal. What angers me is people saying 'life begins at 40' which is clearly a lie. By the time you turn 40 you can no longer, in the bizarre words of one commentator, come home and find your family wiped out go to a monastery and train to be a martial arts expert and wreak revenge. Though this is an odd analogy, it does reflect that from 40 onwards, and probably a few years younger, you are incapable of learning anything new. If you lose your job you will be unable to move into a new career, rather your new job will usually be the same or simply a lower grade version of what you did before. Your options are severely limited. Despite all the legislation, age discrimination creeps in and this means if you have a job you cling to it. There is no longer any opportunity to pack it in and move to somewhere you prefer, you have to hold tight to whatever you can get. Within the job itself your ability to comment and criticise is stripped from you too, or you face the risk of being replaced by someone younger, cheaper and more compliant. You are seen to be out of touch and can be patronised by younger colleagues and yet not allowed to take offence.

From 40 onwards your healthiest part of your life is over. You will never be as fit or free from illness as you were before. Your senses, your memory, your fitness levels all begin deteriorating. Obviously the speed of deterioration is faster for some people than others. I have suffered this for the last couple of years. I do not really feel ill, but I never feel good. My head feels like it is in a box, I am constantly flatulent or bloated, my limbs ache, I find it difficult to wake up in the mornings and come home from work feeling so tired that I can do not activities in the evening. Slumping in front of the television is all that I am fit for these days when even just a few years ago I could cycle 40 miles on a Sunday or write thousands of words of a story in an evening, all of that has gone now and will never return.

Now, I accept that not everyone goes down hill as fast as me, but even if it takes a few more years, you have to face the fact that the best of your life is over. Of course if we lived in Stone Age times we would be dead by now, and even in the 1880s the life expectancy of a working man was 45, so these days were are effectively being kept alive by artificial means and living though what in normal human lives would be 'dead time' quite literally. Your body and brain are not equipped to take on new skills or fitness once you turn 40, for the biological pattern there is no need for this as you should no longer actually be around. I suppose with the juvenalisation of our society and middle age being pushed further into the 50s rather than starting at 40 as it did in my youth, I guess people are tempted to pretend that they are not ageing. For women it might be a bit different as the menopause can mean the end of complicated and uncomfortable contraceptive methods and a greater freedom in sex, but the menopause itself brings on physical difficulties to counteract this gain, plus all the wrinkles that commercials seem to advise you how to combat.

The juvenalist behaviour of the middle aged means they have lost the respect of those who are both younger and older than them. The elderly look down on us with disapproval, the young as if we are irrelevant. We need to restore the credibility of the middle aged by behaving properly, not thinking we can begin to snowboard and go to Take That concerts. As it is, our bodies are not up to it. I will try to live my middle age appropriately and encourage others to do so rather than fooling themselves about their capabilities.