Memory Lane
Created | Updated Mar 26, 2002
Following my recent contribution to the h2g2 Post (10/4/00) - also posted in other places - of my yarn Addicted To The Weather, I have been asked if I still keep in touch with my English mates from the 70s. Since returning to New Zealand I haven't, but my brother, who has lived in England since 1971 has, albeit at arms length. I asked him to bring me up to date on their current circumstances. Here are edited highlights - lowlights? - of his report.
'Almost all the men you knew in England are now in their mid to late forties. And they've all gone mad. Travelling around to renew defunct friendships I just lurched from mid-life crisis to mid-life crisis. The women seem to have been able to hold it together better but I don't think they had much fun.
I once shared a flat with Rob (He was the guy I had the weather argument with... Loony) where his room was famed for its squalor. Now he lives in a top-floor flat which looks much the same except that the pictures of Che Guevara have been replaced by drawings done by his eight-year-old daughter. She lives around the corner with her very tall mother. We took her, the daughter - definitely not the mother - round a castle for the afternoon and I bought her ice-creams because Rob still has no money. She was a delight. Rob loves her so much he's trying to get a job. In the years since we last met Rob has done lots of things except work.He spent a year in prison and liked it. Unlimited hot showers, three meals a day and lots of time to read meant a huge boost to his lifestyle.
We went to see Nick, a friend of Rob's who lives on a houseboat and is also a member of the moneyless single parents' club. When we arrived it was raining and the boat was sitting on mud, which rather took the romance out of it. But we drank tequila under a hurricane lamp and discussed where we'd gone wrong, and then went out. The only well-kept business in the grim port was called Bennett's Funeral Parlour. Next door to it we ate vegetarian curry and discussed the difference between fate and destiny. At one point I thought I'd grasped it but then it disappeared into another bottle of Cobra. But by the time we got back to the boat the tide had come in, so that was all right.
From there I drove north to see Tom and Elia. Tom has made lots of money and now runs his own business. They've got four kids and a huge house, which Tom walked out of a few weeks ago to move in with his number two at work. Two weeks later he sacked the number two, came home and cried for a whole evening. I spent three hours listening to him in the pub, and then three hours next morning listening to Elia. The nub of Tom's problem was that he felt he had got what he had always thought he wanted but then wondered whether that was it.
Then back to London to see Jeff the actor, who always used to find girlfriends who were crazy. In middle-age he hasn't lost the knack. He's now found himself a real Lulu who only has to read about some new neurosis in order to suffer from it. Jeff doesn't know what to do. But then he never did.
I haven't the time or inclination to list the rest of the catalogue of split marriages, existential doubts, career changes and other trauma my brother reported on. But it does seem that your forties are a decade of unravelling. It's as if everyone is looking for the days that went missing somewhere.
