Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

Copyright © Miranda Sawyer 2016

Miranda Sawyer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007521081

Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780007509157

Version: 2017-04-11

Dedication

For S, P and F

Epigraph

‘Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything’

Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow

‘You’re going to have to fucking swallow this whole fucking life and let it grow inside you like a parasite’

Malcolm Tucker, The Thick of It

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1. Is This It?

2. Adult-ish

3. Never Mind the 90s

4. Carry On

5. This is a Low

6. Jealous

7. Sex

8. Fitness

9. Looks

10. Routine

11. Out of It

12. Work

13. Anger vs. Dismay

14. Music

15. Playing to Win

16. Time

17. Long-term

18. Death

19. Generations

20. Now

Acknowledgements

Also by Miranda Sawyer

About the Publisher

1. Is This It?

The start is always quiet. Even when the event is catastrophic, when it’s sudden and violent and crashes in, a meteor blazing from the sky to change everything you know – even then, what people say is: ‘It happened out of the blue. Everything was normal. Nothing seemed any different. It was a complete shock.’

When what is happening is gradual, when it seeps under the door, like water or smoke, then the start is even quieter. It’s silent. You don’t notice it at all.

Middle age is a time of settled status, when your achievements, your experience and your knowledge knit together to create sustenance and prestige, and you are taken seriously, valued as a high-contributing member of society.

‘You’re a smelly bum-bum,’ says F, my daughter. Her face is full of sneer and delight. ‘And when you die, I can have all of the sweeties that are in the tin up there. And I can go to Africa to see the funny cows that Miss telled us about. And I can have your shoes that are sparkly.’

We were talking about us not having a garden, about moving flat maybe, probably not. I was feeling frustrated.

‘But, you know, feelings aren’t facts,’ said my husband, S. He had been saying this a lot to me: ‘Feelings aren’t facts.’

What you feel is not what is actually happening here.

S is an emotional man, and he uses his mantras to reassure himself as much as me. He was right. The facts remained; they were unchanging. How I felt about them – how I feel about them – makes no difference. The sun rises, the day begins, the school opens, the children go out and then they come back, I work, ideas are sent off, plans are made, the plans succeed or they don’t, meals are eaten, and off to bed, and again, and again. Time passes, more quickly than you dare to think about.

These are the facts. I am in my forties. I have a job. I am married. We have children and a flat with no garden, and a mortgage and a fridge-freezer and a navy blue estate car. None of this is a surprise. Is it?

Except … a mood can gradually take over, change the way you feel about the facts. Warp them into something different. You know how it is to fall out of love with someone? How the simple reality of them walking into a room, or the way their teeth clink on a mug as they drink their tea can make you hate everything about them, even though they are the very same person you once found so bewitching? I did not feel this about my husband. I was wondering if I felt it about myself. About my life, and who I had become.

There were other feelings. A sort of mourning. A weighing up, while feeling weighed down. A desire to escape – run away, quick! – that came on strong in the middle of the night.

But the main feeling I had came in the form of a moving picture, a repeat action. I am standing in a river, the water flowing, cold and silver, bubbling and churning around my feet. It’s lovely, really lovely, and I’m plunging my hands in, over and over, trying to catch something. Have I dropped it? Is it a ring? Or was it a fish I wanted?

No. It’s the water itself. It’s so beautiful. I want to hold it in my palms, bring it up close, clutch it to my heart. I want to stop it rushing past me so fast.

A crisis sounds so thrilling. A breakdown. A revolution. A sudden change, institutional collapse. Something dramatic.

One that happens in your forties? Hmm. Less so. We all know what that is. We see the outward gesture – the new car, the extreme haircut, the unusually positioned piercing – and we smile. We patronize. Look how silly he is, in his baseball cap, on his motorbike, with his new lover on his arm. Not dashing, not carefree, not youthful. Sad. And see her, with her tragic attempts to slow time, the clothes that are too young for her, the organic diet, the new lips. Ridiculous. Laughable.

Under the showiness of the exterior, there is a change within. All the stuff we see, no matter how clichéd: that’s just telling the world.

No show, here, however. I wasn’t running off with a Pilates expert. I didn’t blow thousands on a trip to find myself. I didn’t even get a shit tattoo. There was nothing to witness. From the outside, all remained the same. Work, kids, marriage, mortgage, blah. The facts didn’t change.

If the crisis seeps in, if the start is silent, you need a jolt to realize it. Having F was my jolt.

Our second child, she arrived late (five years after P, our son), a quarter-year before I turned 44. S and I knew we were very lucky. No matter what age you are when you have children, if they are healthy, you are lucky; and no matter what age you are when you have children, their arrival makes you feel young and old at the same time. The difference is, if you have them in your forties, the old part is more of a head-nag.

The jolt. I can pinpoint it. It happened one day when I was in the kitchen, working on my laptop. F was only a few months old. She was a good baby, cheerful and self-contained. She liked her bouncy chair and I would put it on the kitchen floor so we could smile at each other as I wrote. I typed, the washing machine spun, she bounced and grappled with a toy monkey called Monkey. All was serene. We were happy in our tiny life.

I looked at her as I wrote and I thought, You are amazing.

And then I thought, By the time you’re 18, I will be over 60.

I stopped writing.

I thought, When you’re 18, I will just about have the strength to push you out of the front door and into your adult life before I have to check into an old people’s home.

I thought, What about university fees? What if you don’t leave home completely, and want to move in again? We’ll need to sell the flat to get the money for the old people’s home.

Then I thought: If I’m tired now, that is nothing compared to how knackered I’m going to be dealing with two teenagers in my mid to late fifties. Plus, I still have all these things I need to do! Like … well, I don’t know. But things that are important for me and my development. Also, we really need to get the front gate mended.

I looked at F and she looked at me, smiling, kicking her legs. She said, ‘De du da de du,’ and twisted her hands in front of her as though she were changing channels on a 1980s TV. I thought: That’s an old-school motion right there. Then I thought: You’re showing your age.

What F made me realize was that I was over halfway through. At 40, I could still convince myself that, with a decent diet and some luck when crossing the road, I could well have more than forty years to go. It’s a lot harder to do that at 44.

I looked at F and I suddenly knew – really knew – that I had less time to go than I had already lived. That the time I had was a limited resource, that life was an astonishing gift and both were diminishing every day.

Lots of people get weird around this age, I did realize that. If you don’t get Fear of Forty, then Fear of Fifty will do it. The Fear: of everything that you have become, and everything you have not.

Eugene O’Neill, in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, wrote: ‘None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it. And once they’re done, they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be and you’ve lost your true self for ever.’

(What has life done to me? What have I done? What would I like to be?)

Victor Hugo wrote this: ‘Forty is the old age of youth; 50, the youth of old age.’

I thought about this a lot. So what happens in those ten years in between? And who wants to be a young old person? Even though that is all we ever are?

I’d had my jolt. I’d clocked my unmarked midpoint; I knew that time was running out … But what to do about it? Life is busy in your forties, whether or not you have children. It’s hard to keep everything tied down. Most days, I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when the twister hits and the house goes up, gazing out of the window as essential parts of her life whirl past. Her family, her friends, adversity (witchy Miss Gulch on the bike), livelihood (the cow – all out of control, spiralling towards the future, out of Dorothy’s reach and remit. She can’t help them, though she knows she must.

That is how my life is in middle age. So many people to take care of, so many jobs to do. A lot to catch and tether, and who can grab hold of anything when all the important bits are constantly in motion? Round and round, faster and faster. Are we moving forward or just spinning on the spot?

What I really wanted was for everything to stop, for the house to land, with me still inside. I wanted to arrive in a sunlit place, to be celebrated as a new magical queen, and to have the time to enjoy it. A place made of sweets, where the small people who surrounded me – let’s call them my children – all sang in tune and did what I told them to. Also, that when I landed, I’d crush the life out of my enemy, whoever my enemy is. That would be brilliant. Splat, gone, byeee. Gimme your shoes. And when you die, I can have your shoes that are sparkly.

Now that F is no longer a baby, she talks about death all the time. She kicks it around in her head, riffs on it to delay me putting her to bed. She doesn’t want to go to bed. Too much to do, and she’s scared of the dark (of death). She talks about death as though it’s a cool result. To her death has glamour, because it’s frightening and exotic and it won’t happen.

The idea of death. In your teenage years, your twenties, it becomes an existential concept. Actually, it can be a comfort: nothing matters, because we’re all going to die anyway. We’re all going to die, so what’s the point in learning quadratic equations, or cleaning under the bed?

When we’re young, we like to be scared by death, because it seems so remote. But in your middle years, it starts moving closer, nearer to you. Coming into focus. Becoming real.

When F was still a baby, after that moment in the kitchen, death started doing weird things in my head. It kept merging with maths. I was adding and subtracting, calculating how long I had left, how little time I had to do what I thought I had to do. Earn money. Fulfil my potential. Do whatever it was I should be doing, rather than worrying about my age and my life and what that meant.

Death maths. I was doing my death maths and I didn’t like the way the sums were adding up.

I started noticing the middle-aged men who said, ‘I’m going to live to a hundred.’ There were quite a few. The head of Condé Nast said this. A French actor. Eddie Izzard said it to me, in an interview, in a fabulously positive way.

‘I’m going to live to a hundred. Why not?’ he said, a man who ran 43 marathons in 51 days, at the age of 47, for a laugh. And then ran 27 marathons in 27 days, at the age of 54, for another giggle. Why not indeed? When Eddie said it, I was almost convinced. Maybe I, too, still had a long way to go.

But one day, when I was meant to be doing something else, I bothered to look up the stats. I saw the true death maths, and the death maths was clear. If you were born in the UK between the late 60s and late 70s, and you’re a man, then all the research says that your life expectancy is 80. If you’re a woman, it’s 83.

You can probably add on a few years if you’re middle class and don’t smoke. I thought that, too. After I’d read the research, I looked around online and found a more accurate life expectancy questionnaire. I filled it in. Carefully, I totted up my nicotine years, how much I drink, how much I exercise; I converted stones into pounds and pounds into kilograms. There were no boxes that referenced illegal drugs, or rubbish food, or terrible housing or love-life decisions. The questionnaire gave my life expectancy as … 88.

So. It doesn’t matter if you have just run the furthest you ever have in your life, or you neck kale smoothies every day, or you know some brilliant DJs. It doesn’t even matter if you yourself are a brilliant DJ, or if you are Eddie Izzard. At some point between the ages of 40 and 50, you and I will have lived more than half our lives. We have less time left than we have already lived. The seesaw has tipped. There are the facts. And these are the feelings.

It was the death maths that did for me, the pinpointing of the years left, that new (old) knowledge. It started a revving in my head, a pain behind my eyes, a loss of nerve so strong I could barely move. I’m not sure that anyone knew, though. I had dark circles round my eyes, I was tired, but so is every parent of a child under one. And, yes, I was tired because of F, but also because the panic – that dark, revving provocateur – came at night.

I would wake at the wrong time, filled with pointless energy, and start ripping up my life from the inside. Planning crazy schemes. I’d be giving F her milk at 4 a.m. and simultaneously mapping out my escape, mentally choosing the bag I’d take when I left, packing it (socks, laptop, towels of all types), imagining how long I’d last on my savings (not long, because I’d had children, so I didn’t have any savings). I’d be leaving the kids behind. Rediscovering the old me, the real one that was somewhere buried beneath the piles of muslin wipes and my failing forty-something body. I’d be living life gloriously. Remember how I was in my twenties? The travelling I did? That, again, but with wisdom …

Then I’d remember that I couldn’t leave the kids behind, because I loved them so much, and I’d start planning a different escape.

Even while I was doing it, I knew it was vital not to get involved in such thinking, that I really needed to stay put, to look forward. Certainly not hark back. If you keep staring at your past, believing your best times are done, you’ll be facing the wrong way for the next few decades. You’ll reverse into death, arse-first.

And, anyway, hadn’t I’d done those best times wrong? I would consider my younger self and shake my head. I’d decide on the turning points of my life and then spend hours bemoaning the way I’d dealt with them. What had I been thinking, refusing that job? Why did I waste so much time on that deadbeat dickhead? Why didn’t I prioritize what I really enjoyed, rather than trying to please other people? Why didn’t I push myself? What a waste! What a waster!

Sometimes, during the day, as I performed all the tiny, repetitive actions required of an adult when children are young – the wiping, the kissing, the picking up, the starting again – my mind would wander. Worse: it would assess. (No new parent wants assessment: they just want to get through.) I would assess my efforts – my life – so far, and all would come up juvenile and insubstantial. Grown-up epithets burnt in my mind, as though they were absolute truths. It would have been better to have your kids young. Buying a house with a garden is adulthood’s be-all-and-end-all. A good steady job, a good steady love life and a good steady pension are all vital for you to function in today’s world, and you should have established all of those by the time you were 30. At the latest.

In contrast, when I held up my own long-standing beliefs to the light, they seemed broken. The belief that convention was just that, conventional. That, if you and your family weren’t starving, money couldn’t make you much happier. That you were always better to go out than stay in. That a life packed full of experiences was more valuable than one packed full of possessions. I’d rushed around in my twenties and thirties because I’d wanted to enjoy myself out there, to live in the big world, rather than a small one based around acquisition. Where was the pleasure in contemplating the polished wondrousness of a wooden table, or a neatly maintained lawn?

In the middle of the night, when I wasn’t planning to run away, I found myself contemplating those pleasures with envy. We didn’t have a big table, or any outside space. We lived in a stuffed, scruffy flat.

I’d stuck with so many old prejudices – a hatred of wheelie suitcases, of drawer tidies for cutlery drawers – that I’d started to believe my prejudices were my personality. But my new-found late-night hobby of demented self-deconstruction made me see that they were not. They were merely affectations, kickbacks against my childhood and upbringing, the reactions of an overgrown teenager. An overgrown teenager with a family, a mortgage, a fridge-freezer, all that.

And part of my panic was caused by what a friend calls ‘the baby-cage stage’ – how small your world becomes when your child is small, and how manic and locked into it you are – and part of it was the fear of being over halfway through, and part of it was realizing that all the plans I had would remain unfulfilled.

Because I was middle-aged.

Still, could I be, really? There is something about middle age that is terrifically embarrassing. So embarrassing, in fact, that it cannot apply to me. Or you, either. We are of the mind to be young or old. There is cachet in both, even dignity. But not in between. Not in the middle.

Because we know middle age. It belongs to Jeremy Clarkson. It’s blouson leather jackets. Terrible jeans. Nasty out-of-date attitudes manifesting themselves in nasty out-of-date jokes. Long-winded explanations of work techniques that everyone else bypassed years ago. Micro-management of events that mean nothing – e.g. a cake sale. Useless competitiveness about useless stuff that actually boils down to an argument about status, such as Whose Child Is The Most Naturally Gifted? or How Amazing Was Your Holiday In That Villa Of Your Really Rich Mate? or Have You Seen Our New Kitchen? Christ. Who’d want any of that?

Nobody. Or at least nobody I know. I’m surrounded by people my own age who are convinced they’re not middle-aged. They know they’re not young – they sort of know they’re not young – but they’re definitely not middle-aged. And they’re boosted in this belief by mad midlife journalism. There are a lot of articles out there about how middle age doesn’t start until your fifties. Or your sixties. Or never. Everyone over 49 is shagging rampantly while shovelling in the drugs, apparently, just as they were in their twenties, thirties, forties …

Fine by me. Because that means it’s possible that they – that I – will switch easily from their youthful selves into well-maintained, sexy, eccentric, yet wise older citizens. No worries about middle age for us. Suddenly – preferably overnight, if that can be arranged – we will all transform into Helen Mirren and Terence Stamp (looking good!), with the added bonus of Bill Murray’s wit and insouciance. We will merely walk out of one room (marked Young) and into another (Old). No corridors in between, no panicked running from room to room, opening the wrong doors, searching for the exit.

Around this time, the death-maths time, I went for lunch with an old friend. In the 90s, he was a scabrous, hilarious journalist, a man who’d be sent to a far-right politics convention or a drugs den because he’d come back with something funny. Now, he was the same but different (like me, like us all). He was travelled, rather than travelling. And he, too, was struggling with midlife.

I told him of how hard I found it to combine work with little kids. He told me he would like to have children, ‘because then you know what to live for, what the whole point of everything is’.

We had a great lunch and he recommended a book to me. It was about survival. It told the tales of people who have successfully come through extreme events (successfully, meaning they didn’t die). The book was designed to inspire others to reassess their approach to life, meant to excite us boring people into living without fear.

The book was jam-packed with action. A woman was shot by her husband in front of her children. A man was attacked – part-eaten! – by a bear. Another woman had a daughter, a healthy, beautiful, 4-year-old daughter, who caught a virus and died.

God, I hated that book. But there was an image in it that stayed. I can’t remember now why it was mentioned, how it came up, but it was about a chess game. I’ll tell it as I saw it – as I see it – in my head. It’s like a recurring dream.

I am in a bar. It’s a great bar, filled with stimulating people I know a little, but not so well that they’ve heard all my best anecdotes. Someone convivial invites me to play a chess game. ‘Hell, yes!’ I shout, and sit down, slopping my caipirinha as I do so. It doesn’t matter. I am funny, good-looking and clever. Everyone in the room loves me. I am sure to win, but also, as I don’t really care about chess, I’m going to win simply by playing as I wish. No strategy, no sell-out, but many thrilling, unexpected moves that simply pop into my head. Because I’m great!

After about an hour when, in truth, I haven’t really been concentrating on what’s been going on, I go out of the room for a moment. When I come back, the atmosphere is different. The bar seems colder. All the exciting people have disappeared. The lights have dimmed; the person I’m playing chess with is hard to make out clearly.

I look down at the chessboard and see that my hot-headed, non-strategic play has meant that I have lost some vital pieces: a bishop, both rooks, a knight, several pawns. Where did they go? How could I have discarded them so unthinkingly? My armoury is diminished. Moves have taken place that I didn’t even notice, and now my position is weak.

I can see that it’s going to be tough to get anything at all out of this particular match. I’ve played it too casually. I’ve played it all wrong.

I say, with a smile: ‘Perhaps I could start again?’

And someone – my opponent, my conscience, God – answers me, in a voice that’s quiet and calm, but that fills the room, makes my ears ring, my stomach shudder: ‘No. This is the game.’

This is the game.

So I did the only thing I could think of that didn’t involve running away: I wrote about how I was. The fact of being over halfway through my life, and the feelings that fact created. The Observer ran the article I wrote, accompanied by a photograph of me, in a lot of make-up, looking younger than I usually do. This was very kind, though not so useful for the piece.

The article’s title was ‘Is This It?’ And it was, I suppose. Except I couldn’t seem to shake off the uncomfortable feeling, the anxiety itch.

I was still in the grips of my teeny tiny crise d’un certain age (French = more exciting), and it still didn’t show. No alarms and no surprises. I yearned for my desperation to become more flamboyant; I was like the child with stomach-ache who wants a bruise, a plaster, an ambulance rush to A&E. Nothing occurred.

It was pathetic. Who was I kidding? I didn’t pack my bag anywhere except in my head. I couldn’t leave, and a quiet crisis seems, to everyone outside it, like no crisis at all. Why couldn’t I turn my panic into flight – abandon my home, even for a few months – to have a true middle-aged catastrophe? Why didn’t I shag a builder, or a bendy yoga dullard? Why wasn’t I taking a long, solo hike across an unfamiliar landscape, pausing only to meet authentic people who would tell me the meaning of life?

I talked to S about this. I said: ‘Would you mind if I staged a midlife drama, if I left you and wandered around a bit for a couple of months?’

He said: ‘Not a bother. As long as you take the kids.’

On the radio, I heard a writer talking. There was a five-part series of his musings, inspired by the lengthy hikes he takes across cities. An imposing man, he mostly walks at night. I quite fancied this, but it’s a different prospect, going for solo rambles in the early hours when you’re a shortish woman. I thought about cycling, or going for 3 a.m. drives, but both seemed pointless – plus slowing down to talk to a pedestrian when you’re in a car at night could easily give the wrong impression. Also, I still had the days to get through, sorting the kids and earning a living; and S was going away for work, so – babysitting bills.

Still. As a result of the ‘Is This It?’ article, I got a deal from a publisher to write a book about midlife. A book. This book. And I tried to write it. God, I tried. I would bundle P to school and F to the child-minder, and then I would go to the kitchen and sit in front of my laptop, and put my coffee next to it to the right and my phone (switched to silent) to the left; and I would try to write. But the words didn’t come easy, and I had to earn a living, so I would put the book aside and go back to journalism. The quick turnaround kept me busy.

It might have been the head-mush you get when your children are small. Or denial, I suppose. But for some reason, I didn’t seem to be able to approach middle age face on. I couldn’t see it clearly. The panic was there, the Fear, the feelings. I knew how to write about them. But the fundamental crisis seemed to be happening off-camera, just out of sight, weaving itself in and around my everyday life without ever becoming distinct.

For a while, instead of writing, I talked to people. I tried to separate the personal from the more universal. Some of what I was churned up about seemed only to do with me, and some of it was timeless, a classic midlife shock and recalibration, and some of it was hooked into the time I was in, where we all were right now.

There is an element of middle age that is the same for anyone who thinks about it. Not just the death maths, but how the death maths affects your idea of yourself. Your potency and potential. Your thrusting, optimistic, silly dreams, such as they are. As they were … They’ve been forced to disappear. Suddenly, you’ve reached the age where you know you won’t ever play for your favourite football team. Or own a house with a glass box on the back. Or write a book that will change the world.

More prosaically, you can’t progress in your job: your bosses are looking to people in their twenties and thirties because younger workers don’t cost so much or – and this is the punch in the gut – they’re better at the job than you are. Maybe you would like to give up work but you can’t, because your family relies on your income, so you spend your precious, dwindling time, all the days and weeks and months of it, doing something you completely hate. Or you sink your savings into a long-nurtured idea and you watch it flounder and fail. Or your marriage turns strange. You don’t understand each other any more.

In short, you wake one day and everything is wrong. You thought you would be somewhere else, someone else. You look at your life and it’s as unfamiliar to you as the life of an eighteenth-century Ghanaian prince. It’s as though you went out one warm evening – an evening fizzing with delicious potential, so ripe and sticky-sweet you can taste it on the air – you went out on that evening for just one drink … and woke up two days later in a skip. Except you’re not in a skip, you’re in an estate car, on the way to an out-of-town shopping mall to buy a balance bike, a roof rack and some stackable storage boxes.

‘It’s all a mistake!’ you shout. ‘I shouldn’t be here! This life was meant for someone else! Someone who would like it! Someone who would know what to do!’

You see it all clearly now. You blink your eyes, look at your world, at your gut, your ugly feet in their awful shoes and think: I’ve done it all wrong.

I joined internet forums about midlife crisis where men – it was mostly men – lamented their mistakes.

‘I could have done more, been more successful, been a better person,’ said one. ‘I used to be someone but now I’m just part of the crowd.’

‘Maybe,’ said another, ‘I should just resign myself to the fact that I’m not what I used to be. But, see, this is my problem, I can’t …’

Women talked too. A friend’s Facebook status: ‘… the slow realization over the past year that I’ve messed it up. I’ve had a crap start in life and I went on to make a series of poor decisions, so now I’ve made my bed, I’ve got to lie in it. I could be so much more than a fat, grey, toothless, 44-year-old harpy living in a fucking council house with one child who despises me, another who will never live independently, and a marriage that will forever be in recovery … I know it’s up to me to change things. What’s not entirely clear is how to choose the right path. Because I don’t know where I’m going …’

I spoke to a friend who said: ‘I wonder if we messed it up for ourselves, having such a good time when we were young.’

We are each of our age. We share a culture, whether The Clangers, or Withnail, or ‘Voodoo Ray’. Our heroes are communal, our references the same. Everyone has their own story, but it’s shaped by the time in which it’s told.

I’ve always enjoyed being part of something bigger. In the late 80s, I believed in rave and the power of the collective. Even now I like crowds, especially when music is playing; I love gigs, clubbing, festivals, marches, football matches, firework displays. I’m not mad about the hassle of getting to those places, but once I’m there, I’m fully in. As long as it isn’t too mediated, so that you can feel in and of an experience or an audience, so you are there, singly, but also consumed within a whole other entity, the crowd. The crowd has its own emotions, its own rhythm.

It’s good to lose yourself in that. I find it comforting to feel as others do, to share a moment; to know that I’m unique, but not that special. I like to know that what I’m going through, while personal to me, is also part of a pattern.

I thought about the 90s. I was very social. Always out, usually with other people. Most of my twenties took place then, in that time when youth was celebrated, where youth culture came in from the side, where the mainstream was altered by the upstart outsiders. And we – me, my friends, the crowd of us all – felt the rush of it, the need for speed. There was an up-and-out head-fuck that we searched for, constantly. Was that still within us, even now? That weird hyperactivity, the hunt for the high, a hatred of slowing up? A desire to escape the mundane, to be busy and crazed with endorphins. Even now?

In the 90s, drugs were involved in this, of course, and I thought about the people I know who have continued their hedonism into their forties. There were others who waited until middle age to start what used to be called dabbling. Others had given up everything – no booze, no drugs – but seemed driven to find other highs, through exercise: running, cycling, triathlons. Or they turned their drug obsessiveness into a new delight in food. Tracking down the most exclusive, carefully sourced ingredients from an expert, then taking such trouble over the preparation and timing that the moment of ingestion dominated their whole week … I noticed that all the new gadgets had names like ecstasy tablets. The Spiralizer. The Thermomix. The Mirage. The Nutribullet, made by a company called the Magic Bullet.

If you were young in the 90s, how does that affect your middle age?

I tried to think about this as I got up in the mornings, laid the table, helped small limbs in and out of uniforms, checked homework. S was away a lot, at this time, and I was alone with the kids. That was okay. Once you’ve had a child, and that child goes to nursery, or school, or a child-minder, you become plugged into a system. I had numbers to call, in case my arrangements fell through. And F was still little. Until she started crawling, I took her to meetings, showed her off like a new handbag. She was a good distractor.

My thoughts came and went. They mostly turned into questions.

Music was one, of course. I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t believe in music, in what it can do. I’m of a generation that knows that music can save your life, give your life meaning, express the inexpressible, alter your course. People came into nightclubs while on a train track to normality and left believing they could be anything they liked. Their minds were opened up to a different way of living, a new way to work. They rejected the norm, the factory job, the lawyer training. Freelance creativity was their way out.

But what does music mean when you’re older? How does freelance feel when you’ve reached your forties, when you’re in a position where other people – your children – are relying on your work being stable, on the regular pay cheque that comes in every month? The internet had changed most of the creative jobs: journalism, media, photography, books, film-making, acting, fashion, comedy, music. There were fewer jobs and they paid less. All the work that seemed like an escape when we were young wasn’t proving to be so now.

Music, creativity, community, getting out of it. These were more than the habits of a generation: they were – they are – our touchstones. They had been how we got through life, what we had used to help us negotiate its pitfalls and terrors. It could be that part of my midlife angst was concerned with whether the old ways – our old beliefs – were effective any more. And what I could do if they weren’t having the same effect. If they don’t work, if they make it worse, then what?

In Bristol I gave a talk at a Festival of Ideas. I wasn’t sure I had any ideas worth festivalizing, but as what I’d been thinking about was midlife, I talked about that. I brought up death maths, and expensive bikes, drinking too much, and mourning the rush, and middle-aged sex lives. I made jokes about spiralizers.

Afterwards, there were questions from the audience. One man in his early 40s put his hand up and said, ‘I still feel 22.’ (‘Feelings aren’t facts!’ I didn’t say.) He had recently bought a skateboard. He didn’t know whether to learn skateboarding or hammer the skateboard to the wall, as a decoration.

How can we make our minds, which insist that we’re still 22, match up with our bodies, which are twice that age? How do we get rid of the sense of having missed out? How can we stop worrying about looking silly, because of our age? What should we do with our old MA1 jackets, or 12-inch remixes, or twisted Levi’s jeans? Does it matter if we don’t like new pop music? Is it okay to go to all-nighters if we go with our kids? What if we haven’t had kids?

I did my best with the questions. But I hadn’t studied mindfulness or sociology. I’m not a self-help guru. I can never tell if a new moisturizer makes any difference at all to my wrinkles. I was uncertain about many things, including time and consciousness and whether my mood (which was upbeat) was due to the warmth of the hall or the peri-menopause.

I wondered, what is an adult? We stretch our youth so far, so tight. We pull it up over our ageing bodies, like a pair of Lycra tights. We all do it to a certain extent, and yet we’re cruel to those who seem to hold on too hard for too long. We laugh about MAMILS (middle-aged men in Lycra) and cougars (middle-aged women sleeping with younger men). We mock women who have Botox and surgery, even as we urge them to stay as young-looking as they can. We giggle at dad-dancing, post up patronizing ‘Go on, my son!’ clips of grey-haired ravers on Facebook.

But it’s double standards. Because didn’t we, in our hearts, believe that youth is better than middle age? I think we did. I think we do. And our youthful ideals were clashing with our ideas of adulthood. There was a fight going on, inside and out. We take our children to festivals and get more trashed than they do.

‘What do you do in nightclubs?’ asked P. ‘I know you dance, but how long for? Can you choose the music? Why does everyone drink alcohol if it makes them ill?’

P once had a severe dancing-and-sugar comedown after a wedding. He danced for hours, fuelled on Coca-Cola and sweets. In the morning, he woke, white as a sheet, was sick, and had to go back to bed. He actually said, ‘I’m never doing that again, Mum. Never.’ His hangover was textbook, even though he didn’t drink.

I was great in nightclubs, but what did that qualify me for now? Could I continue with what I did – writing about popular culture, especially music – now that I was twice the age of those I talk to? A music writer. A critic. These jobs are as old-fashioned as being a miner, and as destined for redundancy. That’s a proper hangover.

Anyway, weren’t clubs partly about fancying people? I seemed to have a shifting sense of who I am. If you’re settled in a relationship, what does that mean? How does middle age affect your idea of love, of sex, of faithfulness? What about money? Not only did I know many people who earned a lot more than me, money, in general, seemed to have changed its meaning.

And what of the shallower stuff? How I looked. What my body could do, how it worked. My blood still pumped, I still bled. Did my body bleed as it used to?

Gradually, gradually, in between the bubbling, same-old rigmarole of everyday life, I came up with a plan. I would look back for a short time. (What’s the phrase? ‘Looking back is fine but it’s rude to stare.’) I would look back quickly, just long enough to investigate my prejudices and assumptions about adulthood. I would recall my twenties, check in on my thirties. There would be no beating myself up about wrong decisions, I would merely tell the tale. And then, I would arrive at my forties and I would look at that. At this middle decade, between the old age of youth and the youth of old age.

I would think about what I looked like. What my body can do. What marriage means, what happens when it changes over time. Work, and how our 90s’ assumptions might affect how we work now. Money. Money, which leads to jealousy. Anger, and patience, how they grow or die.

How children impact on your life in the everyday. Not the love – the love is assumed, we know the love – but what having children means for those who care for them, the routine of them, the stability. Parents. Family.

And death, I suppose. Time. The time left.

If I couldn’t tie these subjects down, catch them, skewer them with a ready pin for labelling and exhibition, then at least I could watch them fly. I could marvel at their existence. I might even see them settle (from the corner of my eye), and then I might glimpse their colours.

2. Adult-ish

January is always a bastard. Not only because it’s January, but because it’s my birthday, on the 7th. Exactly one week after New Year’s Eve, two weeks after Christmas Eve, when nobody wants to go out, or drink alcohol, or spend money, or see anyone they know well ever again, other than to tell them precisely what they think of them and their crappy idea of a gift or a joke or a long-term partner. S has used up all his present ideas for me over Christmas. And even if I do celebrate my birthday, the next day when I wake up, guess what? It’s still January.

But, you know, the kids love a birthday. They love giggling outside our bedroom door and then sneaking up to the bed with all the noiseless subtlety of piglets in mining boots. They love nudging each other – ‘You go, go on, one, two, three’ – before shouting, ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MUM,’ and singing the birthday song and its coda: ‘How old are you now? How old are you now? How old are you NO-OW? How old are you now?’ They know the answer. Those birthday bumps would break your back.

Downstairs, on the kitchen table, my array of presents is minimalist. A card from my mum. A printout of a photo of the four of us from S, with a promise to ‘buy you something later’. Two packets of Haribo Tangfastics, my favourite sweets, from P, wrapped wonkily in Christmas paper. Not exactly bumper. But you know what? It’s fine.

I take the kids to school and F tells everyone it’s my birthday, and my age. This is also fine. I’m not going to start lying about it. How old am I no-ow? I am 44. I am 45. Or 46, 47, 48. Not much has changed in the past few years. I am an adult. Whatever that is.

I watch P as we walk to school. Though I often forget how old I am, and when I remember it pulls me up short, he is of an age when every birthday is vital, when how many years (months, days) you’ve lived add up to power. When two years’ age difference is a chasm, an insurmountable status gap. Another small boy, a head taller than my son, just another kid to me, is as thrillingly attractive and powerful to P as a pop star. He keeps trying to play football with the older boys. He trots faster to catch up with them. I can see them tolerating his breathless jokes, bearing his presence, but only just.

P’s birthday parties involve football, usually; sometimes the cinema or Laser Quest. What did I do when I was his age? How about older? 15? I can remember my 17th birthday (in a Scout hall) and my 21st party (above a pub) and my 30th, and my 40th, just a few years ago. My 40th birthday party was very like my 30th. The main difference was that when a stranger offered me ecstasy, I didn’t take it.

I don’t want a party like that now. I’m not sure why. Some time over the past few years I lost the desire to be the centre of attention and the stamina required for all the organizational palaver. I wouldn’t mind a party in the summer, maybe, with champagne cocktails and up-and-at-’em music, around a heated open-air swimming pool. A barbecue. Nicely dressed young people topping up drinks. In Los Angeles.

But in January, in London, in an expensive, cramped, roped-off area of a pub that you have to vacate at 11 p.m. or share with whichever punters decide to wander in? No, thanks. Maybe I’ll think differently when I’m 49 and a half.

Our idea of adulthood is formed by our youth. Adults were a puzzle to me when I was young. I looked at them and thought: How did they ever get married? Who could love these enormous, slow-moving creatures, with their pitted skin and springy hair? Their trousers hung loose over their flattened behinds. Their chipped, crumby teeth were like the last biscuits in the tin. When they were close, unpleasant smells leaked from hidden places. They talked a lot, in booming voices, about nothing important. They sat down. Then they stayed sitting down.

(‘Come on, Mum!’ says F, in frustration. ‘Stop talking! Let’s PLAY!’)

Not all adults were the same. I settled on my dad’s lap and put my hands on the outside of his hands. I tried to force them together, to make him clap. He’d resist, hold steady, until suddenly, he relaxed, and let my pushing win. Blapp! His big hands, cupped, made the most impressive noise I’d ever heard. A gunshot, a crack that split the air, indoors or out. I used to try to copy him. But the Dad Power Clap cannot be made by the young. Only dads, with their dad hands, can create such thunder.

I liked my dad’s smell. He smelt of nothing much, Swarfega sometimes, toast sometimes, talc. He didn’t wear aftershave. My mum didn’t wear perfume. She had a bottle of Chanel No 5, which I played with, but the liquid was orange, the scent was off. Sometimes, she smoked in the car on the way from work and her clothes smelt, not like fire, but chemical, metallic. She hid her cigarettes from us in her handbag. ‘Death sticks’, some people called them. I took them one by one, from the golden box, examined them, slit them open to scrutinize the curling tobacco slivers. Death looked a lot like wood shavings.

She stood in front of me and my brother and said, ‘Look, my thighs join all the way up, too.’ This was to my brother. He was weird about his legs, because mine were a different shape, and he was younger and wanted to be like me. I knew it didn’t matter – who cared what your legs looked like? It was whether you could run fast that was important – but it was another reason to lord over him. I liked to emphasize our differences, though we were very similar. Our bodies were small and strong. We hung them upside-down from anything.

My mum wore no make-up. Her cosmetics bag contained one brown mascara, old and dried up, one lipstick and some shiny blue eye shadow. She rarely used any of them. Not when she went to work, as a secondary-school teacher, not when she saw friends. Only on special birthdays, when we went out to a restaurant to sit quietly and worry over cutlery selection. She wore trousers, no heels. In heels, she towered over my dad.

Neither of my parents put much effort into their appearance – odd, when we lived in a suburb that judged you by what you wore when you put out the bins – but, still, I thought they looked good. Handsome, rather than cute. Slightly 1960s, even in the 70s and 80s. My mum changed her hairstyle a lot: in the space of five years, she had a long orangey bob; a cap of sleek, dark curls; a blonde Purdey-style crop. She wore blouses that looked like shirts, nothing girly, no florals.

And, even when my dad got burnt in the sun, when his stomach reddened in stripes where the skin had folded as he’d sat reading, I thought he was fantastic. (His feet burnt too, so after one day of holiday he wore socks and sandals, like the university lecturer he was.) He was great at sport: football, cricket, throwing and catching, crazy golf, anything to do with a ball. Also, card games, building dens, drawing. He worked out the Rubik’s Cube in a matter of minutes. He could skim a stone so it bounced seven times. He had a side parting and his hair flopped over his right eye.

When I was P’s age, my mum was 37, my dad 40. When I think of my parents, I think of them then, and a little older, as I grew into my teens. I see them in their middle age. Was that their prime? It seemed so, to me.

Now, their elderliness comes as a surprise. How careful they are as they get out of the car, the time it takes, the probing for the pavement with extended foot, how they grip the door frame to pull themselves up and out. Every time they come to stay, and I notice their slowed movements, I have to readjust my image of them, overlay it with the reality. They have changed shape. My dad, once slim as a reed, is rounder. My mum has grown thinner. Their hair, their teeth, all different. They have the accessories of the senior citizen. Age-related discount cards. Spectacles: off-the-shelf, from Boots. Mouth plates, with odd teeth on them, like sparse standing stones. Hearing aids. Sudoku.

Despite all this, they are not as old to me as they once were. When I was a child, when my parents were younger than I am now, they were ancient. But now the gulf is not as wide.

I knew that my parents – my adults – were not like other grown-ups. They were special because they were mine. They loved me, as I loved them. Though I couldn’t truly fathom how they could love each other – not as a separate unit, not without us children to mediate, to inspire passion. I loved my parents in a devoted but patronizing way, convinced that nobody else could want such battered specimens. They were like old teddies. The only people who valued them were those who’d cared for them for a long time.

Other children’s adults were bewildering. Their nostrils were enormous – you could see the hairs in there, sometimes the bogeys. They breathed at you and asked you questions to which there were no proper answers, such as: Haven’t you grown? How’s school? (I do this now.)

They told you off for different faults from the ones your parents chose. Leave your shoes out the back! Don’t blow bubbles in your drink! Use a teaspoon for the sugar! The women wore make-up that made their faces all slidy, the men dressed exclusively in shades of mud-brown, from shoes to spectacle frames. Those slurpy noises they made when they drank their tea, the ‘oof’ when they sat down, said in a comedy voice, to get a giggle. How old were they? Who knew? 25? 42? 117?

At junior school, I loved a few teachers. Mr Buckley, who had a beard and liked a laugh. Miss Braben, who taught us stories. Matronly, shaped like a peg doll, with a shelf bosom and padded hips. Once, she stopped the class to tell us all to look through the window. There was a horse, somehow free to roam south Manchester, galloping past the school, sweaty and wild-eyed. Its enormous head flicked and twisted through the air, its legs glistened; an astonishing sight. We stared. Then we went back to I Am David.

But most teachers – most adults – were scary. Horror-story characters. The headmaster resembled a giant winged insect, striding around in his billowing black gown, leading us in succinct, reasonable prayer at assembly: ‘Dear Lord, we ask you to grant us … a GOOD day … Amen.’ When I went to senior school, there were science teachers with stains on their shirts; a maths teacher who smelt so rank that, when you asked a question, you held your breath as he talked you through what you should be doing. He crouched down to check we understood, kind, careful man that he was; we let out our breath dramatically when he moved on.

One teacher had an enormous pus-filled spot that moved daily from the side of his nose to the space between his eyebrows. One, who taught sports, a woman, made sexy jokes that we didn’t quite understand. One, a Latin teacher, eccentric and funny, was so well-known as a pervert that whenever he told me, or any of my gang of five girlfriends, to stay behind for being naughty, another of us remained too. We didn’t even talk about it, just made sure there were two of us. We backed around the desks as he advanced.

Though I liked many of them – the Latin teacher was one of my favourites – they were all, fundamentally, repellent. Coarse, bloated, unsmooth, hairy. But it wasn’t just their looks. They were Other, a different species from me and my friends, and we were happy with that. I was an anti-adult bigot. I believed in child/grown-up apartheid. I didn’t want to think of them as anything other than alien. I didn’t want them to think of me at all.

Even as I grew into my early twenties, adults remained off-putting. They operated outside us, in their different world. We were in our own gated community, within theirs. This suited us. We looked inwards, we liked our prison. But sometimes our elders would crash across the invisible fences. It was always uninvited, always a surprise.

During the summer I was 21, I worked for a few weeks teaching English as a foreign language in a residential school in Kent. The school was like a stately home, and we taught children from all lands: Italy, Japan, Israel, what was then Yugoslavia. Any child whose rich parents chose to go off shopping in London rather than risk a week’s holiday with their offspring.

At the end of the three weeks, there was a staff party. All of us teachers got drunk; I jumped, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. In the corridor by the kitchens, another teacher, our team leader, a man in his forties, said something irrelevant and plonked his lips on mine. He had a moustache. It was like having your mouth explored by an adventurous damp nailbrush – as sexy as that.

That same summer, I used my TEFL money, plus cash I’d earned as a cleaner, to get a train to Barcelona with three girlfriends. We hung out on the Ramblas, at a square where tourists mingled with black-clad heroin addicts. Another middle-aged man with another moustache: this one grabbed me on the way to some restaurant toilets.

Why did drunk older men think that snogging was an inevitable consequence of having fun? The way they kissed wasn’t sexual, but controlling. It was as though they clamped their mouths on yours to shut you up. But we hadn’t even noticed them before they talked to us.

Adults are outsiders in young people’s real lives, until we make ourselves known, by forcing our way in, by telling them what to do. Until we blunder over, unwelcome gate-crashers at the party.

On the front of a magazine, I see this: ‘Adults Suck and Then You Are One’. A slogan on a jumper. I would like to own this jumper.

Because now I am an adult – one of those inappropriate, frightening, physically bizarre people. I’m quite good at talking to kids, but isn’t there something creepy about that? There’s no hiding my sagging skin, my English teeth. I don’t stick my tongue down anyone’s throat unless I’m married to them. But when I grab my son’s friends as a joke, pretend to chase them round the kitchen for a kiss, COME HERE, LITTLE BOY, MWAH MWAH MWAH, a lumbering dinosaur great-aunt, I wonder: Is this funny or am I properly freaking them out?

What is it about adulthood that is still so unappealing? I don’t want to go back to school, with its bewildering, kid-enforced social rules, so rigid they couldn’t be broken, so fluid they changed every day. But I don’t want to be like the grown-ups I grew up with. So … separate, in such an unappealing world. Dull. Rule-bound. Constricted by paying bills and by convention. Even in what you wore: no one had many clothes then, and what adults wore was practical, designed not to stand out, except on special occasions. Despite the outré flamboyance of some grown-ups’ going-out wear, their working clothes were joyless: suits and sensible skirts, overalls, pinnies.

Adults, teenagers and children were all demarcated when I was young. But something happened between then and now. Children got older (they gained status within the family) and parents got younger – if not actually younger, then in the way they looked, their approach to life. Everyone’s a teenager now, and for a lot longer. The teenager has become revered, absorbed into our normal. Parents and their older children go to the same places to eat, to dance, to hang out. They listen to the same music.

Those teenage tenets of non-conformity, of staying true to your beliefs, rather than compromising them for an easy life, of rebelling against rules that you know are worthless and mean nothing … These are now the attitudes that we all respect. Even in adults, even in politicians. Authenticity is all, and authenticity means an anti-establishment, punching-up strength of character. Tedious, conventional adulthood, that refuge of phoneys and scoundrels, of lecherous old men with moustaches, of the boring, the selfish, the power-hungry – that doesn’t cut it any more. We have extended youth so far that its values have become universal and nobody interesting can ever fully grow up.

3. Never Mind the 90s

Back then, culture was relentless. New music, new ways of dressing and dancing and being would rise with sudden force, crash and break and sweep away all that had gone before. You would see a band in some horrible dive, or hear a track on a dance floor and that was it: everything changed. And somehow everyone knew about it, though there was no internet, no mobile phones. There were magazines, but they came out monthly, or once a week. There were pagers, but they were for drug dealers or on-call doctors, not for telling everyone about a brilliant club that had opened, a squat that was holding free parties, a place where it was all going off. There were radio shows that helped, record shops to hang around in, hand-drawn flyers, but really … We just all knew.

It felt like we were constantly on the cusp of something. A revolution. A change. We’d push at doors and they would open easily. We would be let into places that only weeks before had kept us outside, pulling faces through the windows. And the new kept on coming.

The beginning can be so enthralling, so thrilling, you forget that, for anything to start and thrive, another thing must weaken. The end of the old way is still a death. Something fades, gives up, sits down and never gets up again. Or it fights and dies anyway.

In 1988, I got my first proper job – not cleaning, not TEFL, not working in a shop – and it was the best job ever. I started working for Smash Hits magazine, as a writer. In my job interview, the editor asked me if he should put Elton John on the cover of the new issue (Elton was Number 1 at the time). I said, ‘No way, you should put Brother Beyond on instead.’ That was my lucky break: the editor had, in fact, just done that very thing. I got the job because I wasn’t too far from being one of the pop fans who pored over Smash Hits. This was because I was a pop fan who pored over Smash Hits.

It was the era of Kylie and Bros, and the Smash Hits office was above the BOY shop in Carnaby Street. On my first day, I arrived at 9 a.m., and had to sit on the step outside for an hour until anyone else turned up. Once in, I was installed on a spare chair, in front of an electric typewriter, within a room that appeared to have been attacked by a litter bomb. Every single surface was piled high with paper and 12-inch singles and cassettes and overflowing ashtrays.

Almost all of the staff were from outside London – from Perth, Dublin, Belfast, Dundee, Liverpool – and none of them seemed so different from me. I kept looking around the room, peering between the teetering debris, wondering where the grown-up was – the suit, the scary person in charge. There wasn’t one. Perhaps that was why everyone stayed so late. They were having fun: a new concept when it came to work, for me. I soon joined in, and I didn’t really leave that room – not during weekday daylight hours – for the next two years.

The start of the 90s was marked by my flat burning down. It was a rented flat, three storeys above a pharmacy in south London. At the time, the road was a market street, full of fruit and veg stalls run by shouty locals. On weekends we would wait until the market was ending, then go out and blag cheap vegetables.

I shared the flat with four friends. Two of them plus another mate were in when the fire started. It was very quick. (‘In the time it takes to build a spliff but not light it,’ said D.) They had to climb out of a back window onto a roof. They were still in their pyjamas.

We never found out how the fire had started, though we had our suspicions. It had begun in N’s room, and she favoured floaty curtains, also candles, also leaving the iron on. But we all smoked, so who knows? Her room was at the front, on the first floor, directly above the shop. The fire took hold there and raged upwards, the central staircase that spiralled up the building acting like a very efficient chimney. The blaze took out every single room. Except mine, right at the top at the back. I’d shut my door when I’d left. It was a bank holiday weekend and I’d gone to see my parents.

N phoned me at my mum’s. She said: ‘I’ve got nothing left. It’s back to the brick in my room. We left your window open to let out the smell of smoke.’

That night someone climbed in through my window and robbed the flat of what was left: Levi’s jeans, Technic decks, trainers. Also my tickets to see Prince. I told the police which seats they were for. I thought they would send someone to pick up the ticket-holders, arrest and question them about the robbery. Maybe an undercover officer in Nike Jordans and a Keith Haring T-shirt. They didn’t do anything.

When I got back into the flat, I clambered up the floors, thinking I could salvage stuff. But everything was covered with soot so thick that it wouldn’t come off when you tried to clean it. It just streaked and striped, ingrained itself deeper. The water was cold, the electricity cut. In the bathroom, the disposable razors on the side of the bath had twisted in the heat, curled up like small orange snakes.

I climbed the black stairs to my room and shut the door. Nothing much in there had changed. Some of the photos had fallen down, my trainers and tickets were gone. But otherwise it was exactly as I had left it. It felt like a dream. Around the top of the door, scorch marks stretched, pushing out from the frame and on to the wall. They looked like the black fingers of a monster, scrabbling to get in.

After the fire, everything was different. We were uprooted, homeless. It felt liberating, rather than sad. That group of people split, some coupled up, some left London. I slept on mates’ floors. I left Smash Hits, for reasons I can’t remember now, and I bought a black London taxi. Its top speed was 55 m.p.h. I drove to France in it with N. We played the Stone Roses’ ‘One Love’ as we chugged, very slowly, into Paris.

But we fell out over a bloke. So I drove around France by myself for a month, met up with friends of friends, slept wherever they were, or bedded down in the back of the taxi on the floor. I spent a lot of time on my own in it, rumbling along long, straight roads through tall, straight trees, winding across plains, over mountains. In the evenings, I would drive into the middle of towns, park up and go out to the local bars. Play pool. Talk to people. One time, when I woke, mucky and hungover and too hot, having parked in a lovely quiet square, a whole market had been put up around the cab.

When I got back to London, I met someone who became my boyfriend. I stayed with him in a mate’s room, with all my mate’s stuff still in it. Our stuff made no impression; we didn’t have many possessions to add. When my dad came to visit, he cried.

I sold my taxi to an NME photographer who drove it to the south of Spain and swapped it for a bag of Es. I had no job, nowhere proper to live. Everything was in flux.

All around was fun, though. Raves in film studios that you got to at midnight, locked out until everyone stormed the doors and you were carried in on the tide of people. Gigs: small, drunk, violent events where the lead singer would throw himself off speaker stacks and roll around on the floor and the drummer turned his head to be sick offstage and wouldn’t miss a beat. Afternoons in Soho parks and pubs that would carry on into the evening and some do over east: grubby and empty then, apart from the beigel shops. A squat party at Brockwell Park lido where people were climbing over the walls to get in, sliding down the drainpipes in the corners. I saw a bloke on a bike ride straight into the swimming pool. And then try to carry on cycling along the pool floor.

There were sudden blags – a mate passing an ID bracelet past the PR frontline over and over until we were all in backstage. Festivals where it didn’t rain and you nicked a pass so you could park backstage, with pop stars arriving in helicopters right next to your tent. And you lost all your mates and then you found one, at 6 a.m., trying to put on a top hat by placing it upside down on the ground and falling onto it head first.

Everything kept getting swept aside. Acid house swept away rare groove. Madchester took over. Indie bands – shoegazing and baggy – were suddenly irrelevant when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out. Somehow everything was allowed, except poodle rock and bad pop. Dance music was mushrooming and morphing, taking in rock and hip-hop and ambient and prog and perfect pop and film scores and songs from children’s TV. It churned them all up and spat them out. The beats got faster, darker; the sounds became scary.

Some time in the middle of the decade, Parklife and Definitely Maybe and then The Great Escape and (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory became a competition, and that side of stuff died, really. Britpop became Cool Britannia and was hijacked by the tabloids. Antics that seemed like a laugh when they happened in front of a small group of like-minded people were suddenly a national talking point. Jarvis jumping onstage during Michael Jackson’s performance to make fart signs came from the same instinct as sometime Pulp member Antony Genn streaking during Elastica’s gig at Glastonbury that same year. But it was different because more people were watching. People who didn’t think the same way.

Still. At the beginning of the decade you would see the Roses and the Mondays on Top of the Pops and it would feel like victory. Or Jarvis would wipe the floor with everyone on Juke Box Jury and you would punch the air. Or the Chemical Brothers would get to Number 1, with a video where a girl became a saucer-eyed dancing devil … Something was changing. Someone as quixotic and wild and other as Tricky became a genuine pop star for a few moments.

You couldn’t quite believe that the stuff that was brilliant – and it was patently brilliant – was pushing through into the centre, that the mainstream was taking notice, that bands you knew were amazing but off-beam and awkward were being adopted by everyone. But they were. And the feeling it brought was … correct. We knew we were right.

There was a slow creep upwards during the 80s and early 90s until, whoosh, everything tipped over the edge. And we were rollercoastering, zooming down, arms in the air, our bodies whipped to the side and flung up so quick that we lost our stomachs as we flipped over and over.

No one really had a proper job. Some people were not working much at all, doing the odd day helping out at a mate’s promotions company, or taking shifts at a record store. I was freelancing, writing for Smash Hits, and then other magazines: Q, Time Out, Select, The Face.

Select, a magazine that wrote about alternative music in a pop way, was on the floor above Smash Hits. It was populated by young men, which was a change for me – Smash Hits was mostly women. The Select boys knew a lot about music in a trainspottery way. The only way to push past their knowledge, to be noticed at all, was to talk a lot and never sit down. So I did: I stood up for days and days, chatting, making jokes. I wrote at home, at night.

Select, like Smash Hits before it, was a laugh. But unlike Smash Hits, which had a big circulation and a never-ending array of pop stars willing to be photographed with pineapples on their heads, Select had a limited star squad. The same people on rotation, really. Our job was to come up with interesting feature ideas, because there weren’t enough bands who’d talk to us. We did features on groupies and ecstasy, and how porn was taking over. I wrote pieces about bootleg T-shirts, about stars’ other halves. Once, an entire issue run of 60,000 copies had to be pulped because an article on legal highs included Feminax. The publishers thought a reader might overdose and die (on Feminax! Even if you snorted it, as my friend Gavin did, you only got a little tickle).

I wrote for The Face about boy-racer teenagers and posh students. You could write about anything for The Face. They sent me – a writer with no fashion knowledge – to write about Fashion Week. After traipsing between several sniffy, dull events, I got to go to an Alexander McQueen show. It was in a warehouse and it was exactly like going to a rave: the scramble outside, the flat impossibility of entry. But I knew clubs. I knew what to do. I pushed to the front, talked my way in on the door. It was easy.

Nathan Barley had nothing on The Face back then. We gave out free wallpaper, designed by Björk: just the one magazine-sized piece. I think we thought readers would buy loads of copies so they could cover a wall. My flatmate started playing Tomb Raider and I watched him manoeuvre pixel-pixie Lara Croft, with her square-muscled bum and swingy ponytail, through Raiders of the Lost Ark caves to fight dragons. I thought: We should put her on the cover! We did: not a human version, the cartoon-game version of Lara. On the inside spread she wore Versace and Gucci.

We once did a fashion shoot that featured models wearing nothing at all. You were meant to infer the clothes from the marks they left on the models’ skin – the crease marks around the wrist, the redness left by a belt. But the printing was so bad you couldn’t see the detail. The shoot was naked models, accompanied by captions about what they weren’t wearing. A 90s’ version of the emperor’s new clothes.

All those kind-of friends you met through going out, who made films or music or danced so hard they made a club change its atmosphere, or were just funny and great-looking, had a way with clothes or a knack of being everywhere first … All those people, they were making the stories. Pushing the horrible youth establishment (Dave Lee Travis!) off their pedestals, forcing their own agenda.

We were so good at having a good time. Everyone noticed. Everyone wanted to join in. We didn’t mind too much. When you see your friends and friends of your friends take over music and art and magazines and modelling and comedy and films and books and clubs, you think, Great. This is what we want. We are going to win.

‘You know who you remind me of?’ says a mum in the playground. ‘You know those girls who used to be on TV, the tomboy ones. Zoë Ball, Denise Van Outen … They had a name for them …’

I remember the name: ladettes. I know the story of the 90s. I’ve made documentaries about it for radio. I’ve been interviewed about it for TV. My memories are my own, but they fit with the history that’s usually told, as long as they’re edited.

But the turning points are different, for me. Nobody really cared about Blur v. Oasis, except in an oblique way: look how BIG everything’s got! The people who made it in the 90s were from alternative culture. Not all of them – not Chris Evans, not the Spice Girls – but those who kept music close to their hearts. And that meant that when everything got big, when the full glare of the tabloids was trained on them, they didn’t like it. They couldn’t really cope. Even the ones who seemed to truly desire it – Oasis, Kate Moss, Damien Hirst, Damon Albarn – they had to move away from that light. It was too much. The establishment, the mainstream is scary and intolerant and more powerful than you might expect. It reduces everything to its basest motive: money-sex-power. Which is fun, for a time, but it’s not everything you want. It’s not what you’re about. You’re trying to make something new.

Blur fractured; Graham limped away. Oasis changed their entire line-up, apart from the Gallagher brothers. Pulp splintered. Suede stuttered. Elastica collapsed. Other bands had members kill themselves, or get very ill, or become overwhelmed with addiction, or withdraw.

The drugs changed. No more poppers and speed, no more weed and mushrooms and Feminax. Ecstasy, of course, cocaine, ketamine, and then, heroin. Weird stuff like PCP, which gave you flashbacks of little green men explaining the meaning of life. People started falling through the cracks, disappearing. Some were sectioned. Some died. Some went away and never came back. I wrote a piece about heroin and smoked it, though I hated downers, only liked the stuff that took you up and out. I got a cab home, was sick outside our gate and slept for fifteen hours. People got cross with me about the feature. Someone phoned me up and shouted at me about revealing he used heroin, even though I didn’t mention him at all, even though I hadn’t known he was on it.

I got shouted at quite a bit because of my articles. In one, I got methadone and methadrine mixed up, and a lead singer bawled me out backstage at a Rollercoaster event. In another, I put in a quote from one singer wanting another singer to die of AIDS and it caused huge problems. You just didn’t know what would blow up, really. I still thought I was only writing for people like me. People who were relaxed about drugs, who got the joke, who knew that the important bit was the music and the characters around it, and the highs and spin-outs and stupid stuff that came with it all.

The mainstream changed to accommodate us. It really did feel like we’d won. A Labour government got in, for the first time since the 70s. Bars started opening until 2 a.m., and some, all night. Working-class people were celebrated, allowed to be exceptional. Extraordinary ordinary people had become our heroes, and, after they moved aside, Big Brother started and reality TV became the way to make everyday amazingness into stars.

The other day, I came across a piece I’d written for The Face in 1996. It was called ‘Where Were You When the 90s Happened?’. It made me laugh when I saw it. It’s so hard to assess an era or a state of mind when you’re in the middle of it. It redefines itself from a distance, over the years.

The important thing about the 90s was that I was in my twenties, I suppose. We were good at being young. Our belief in change was the same belief that all young people have, but we were lucky. Our generation had the circumstances, the impetus, the gold-plated opportunity to be able to push our beliefs out into the world. Many of our ideas are still around.

At the end of the 90s, I’d moved flat ten times, got through four cars, two serious love affairs and a few not-so-serious. I’d gone away a lot, for work (Las Vegas, LA, New York) and for me, because I’d needed to open up my head. I’d been to Cuba, to Mexico, to Iceland, to the Scottish islands, to Australia, to Nova Scotia, all around Europe. I’d done a bit of telly presenting (I never saw the shows because I was always out), I’d interviewed a lot of musicians, I’d written umpteen features on going out and staying up, on trainers and driving. I’d danced all night, then carried on to the next night, over and over. I’d written a book, about suburbia. In the summer of 1999, on a tour designed to take books into nightclubs, prove that the chemical generation liked to read, I’d met S, who I’m now married to.

So much change, so much energy. I know it was me, but it feels like it wasn’t. And, God, it sounds exhausting.

4. Carry On

We left the 90s behind and continued in much the same way as before. (When are you meant to stop? Is there a signal? How do you know?) On New Year’s Eve 1999, we met up at a friend’s flat and then rushed to the South Bank to goggle at the fireworks, high on the crowd – excitable, international, cuddly – as well as the exploding sky.

Afterwards, in the early hours of the new millennium, a group of us bunched across a packed bridge, straggled through closed-to-traffic tunnels to get to a club. We were blitzed, so it took us quite a while; anyone watching might have been reminded of Monty Python’s 100-yard race for people with no sense of direction. One or two of us freaked out on the way – everyone held hands and ran until it was better, like 5-year-olds in the park. And then we were there.

I don’t know how long we lasted, but long enough for the evening to splinter, to turn into individual adventures that you recounted later when you bumped into each other at the horse-trough washbasins, when you fell on your friends as though you’d been parted for years, rather than hours. Were we playing hide and seek at one point? Did we kick our legs out from behind pillars, like stupid pole-dancing ponies? As the sun rose, S and I went to an after-party in a bar off Leather Lane. It had a spiral staircase and a minor film star was there. We slumped on squishy sofas, teased the film star, made each other laugh.

We took photos of ourselves on our digital camera when we got home, thinking we were beautiful, but we looked sweaty and mad. Not that it mattered. We dragged the duvets to the sofa and watched nature films all day.

A few days later, I turned 33. And gradually, gradually, things began to change. Friends were finding partners, leaving house-shares, settling into new places with each other. Or they were leaving the country, resettling in a different way. We were still going out: just up the road, to Basement Jaxx’s Rooty in the George IV, or miles away, to Glastonbury, or Ibiza. We got excited about bands. The Strokes: I remember seeing them at Heaven, gorgeous cartoons, rock-star Muppets. The Libertines, not so much. UK garage gradually warped into what would become grime, which I really liked, but I danced to it in my kitchen or at festivals, not at clubs.

The money I got from writing the book on suburbia meant that I could put a deposit on a flat, so I did, and moved in with two flatmates. We tiptoed around the new place, marvelling at how grown-up it seemed: the previous owners were a family, and everything was painted and maintained. The rented flat we were leaving was not so pretty. There, the walls were beige anaglypta, fingerprinted, smudged. The kitchen was orange with grease. In the bathroom, part of the ceiling had collapsed and was held up by the shower rail. When you went to the toilet in there, you had to wear a cycle helmet, in case the whole thing came down completely (health and safety). The new flat had Victorian fireplaces, sash windows, stripped wooden doors with china handles, and it seemed astonishing, solid and artily bohemian, an entry point to a proper life.

And so it proved. After a few months in our new palace, one friend moved out; then S moved in; then, a year or so later, the other friend left. Now there’s no more moving: we still live in the same flat, S and I and our kids.

There were weddings, on and off over the decade. There were kids, too, to join the children a few people already had. A range of ages of parents and offspring, but a sudden rush of births after I was 36. We left everything to the final deadline, squeezed in adulthood as late as we could.

Time was doing what it does, ticking on, disappearing, bit by bit by bit. Opportunities were opening up as others were shutting down. There are people who are good at knowing when to move on, the best time to leave, the new thing to follow, where to go and when. They seem born with excellent timing. They’d somehow bought two-bedroom flats while they were in their early twenties. They were busy setting up companies, or were selling the ones they’d already established (when? how?). They were ‘moving into digital’.

But there are those of us who make decisions too quickly, or too slowly, or who don’t even realize there are decisions to be made. We continue with what we’re doing because it’s what we do, or because we like it, or we’re loyal to something that perhaps is long gone. Or we sack it all on a whim, move from job to job, changing but not progressing, trying out new versions of the same thing.

I’d been working for the Observer since the mid-90s, as a regular writer, but I was still a freelancer. This suited me, though I wasn’t always good at it. I said yes to jobs I was awful at, turned down opportunities that seem life-changing now. And when I got a new job, I couldn’t work out, always, how I was meant to behave, what I was supposed to be doing. I needed an editor, a producer; a mentor, maybe. I wasn’t concentrating. I landed another book deal, for a biography, but I couldn’t deliver. I wrote dramas that didn’t work out. I helped with online start-ups, I mentored teenagers who wanted to be journalists. I wrote columns and my columns were okay. But other columnists came along and they were sharper, funnier or more surreal: they were better.

S and I had met in 1999, and we gave each other an excuse to carry on going out, to continue with what we‘d been doing separately (we’d been going to the same places, sometimes even the same parties, we’d discovered) but now with each other. We extended our work trips and went to Thailand, to China and New Zealand. We found the cheapest flights we could to Trieste, Amsterdam, Cornwall, the Pyrenees.

I’m not so good at remembering what happened when we went away, what we saw. S tells me tales of our trips and it’s as though I never went. I remember the feelings, though.

‘God, do you remember how much we used to argue?’ I say to S. ‘How could we be arsed?’

Our relationship wasn’t smooth. It was difficult in the early years: we were both used to doing what we liked; our backgrounds were different; we found it hard to compromise into partnership. But we were cheap to run, we loved each other. Lucky us. Some of our friends had hooked up with the wrong person. Years of their time had been invested in a partner who suddenly didn’t want to stay around, or who was already attached and never leaving their partner, or who was playing them against someone else. Often, it was women who suffered the fall-out. There were emergency rescues from outside bars, long phone calls at odd hours, evenings spent drinking, bitching, comforting.

Love lives, always hard to make sense of, were becoming even more difficult, weighted down with future pressure. Where were these affairs going, what was the point if they weren’t going to make it? And it wasn’t only love affairs. Friends (and us) were losing jobs; there were pregnancies and non-pregnancies, sudden illnesses, dying parents, sick kids, debt. Adult problems that we weren’t qualified to deal with.

‘I feel like we’ve been sitting at the back of the class, messing about,’ said my friend L. ‘And now we’ve looked up, and everyone else has been knuckling down for ages, without us noticing. They’re going to pass the exams. We’re the only ones left back here.’

There were so many changes, behind the scenes, in front of our faces. And yet it’s easy to think that your thirties are not so different from your twenties. We thought this. You’re just carrying on, refining, tweaking, but essentially remaining the same.

Maybe you look better than you did in your twenties because you’re not slathered in make-up or wearing clown clothes. You’ve grown into your face; you know which haircut suits you. You can understand oblique conversational references (‘She’s grand,’ meaning, ‘I hate her’); you realize when jobs are being offered or are about to be taken away (be wary of any conversation that begins ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard our news?’). You don’t burst into tears quite so much. You speak up when you feel something’s wrong. You have less time for people you can’t get on with and they have less time for you.

The side-tracking is still there, though. The diversions. The wandering around town in the afternoons, the not-answering your phone, the lunches that turn into evenings that turn into weekends. The belief that you’re still an outsider, some sort of rebel manqué, sitting on the edges sniping at The Man. But The Man will only notice you if you’re doing something worth noticing.

What’s strange is that you do no more side-tracking than you did in your twenties, not really. You probably do less. You certainly spend less time drunk. But time is moving faster. It is, it is.

At that particular moment, the internet began to make a difference, to music and to books and to the media. The magazines I worked for started to close, one by one. Select shut down in 2000; The Face in 2004; Smash Hits, 2006. The Mirror launched a magazine in 2002, and I wrote a column for it; it was shuttered two years later. The Observer remained, and its sister paper, the Guardian. Both changed their size from broadsheet to Berliner in 2005. The new-sized printing presses cost £80 million, which was deemed a worthwhile investment, as though printing equipment was like London property.

Though most newspapers were still alive, there was pressure on fees, a blanket ban on contracts. One paper gathered together all its regular freelance writers and photographers to tell them it valued them highly but their rates would be cut in half from then on. A hundred per cent of the work; fifty per cent of the pay.

The internet had already messed up the music business, that no-longer-warbling dead canary in the goldmine. Music was all over the place. The money to be made in it was shifting from albums to gigs; record companies and promoters were haggling over what they thought was their share. At one point, mobile phone ringtones were deemed to be the way to wring profits from songs. In 2001, Apple launched iTunes and the iPod, and the iTunes store in 2003. Albums were unbundled, non-singles rendered worthless.

Still, to us, our ways of working remained the best. They had glamour, they were fun. We understood what to do, what the results meant. (Were our ways the old ways? Hadn’t we only just invented them?) We laughed and bitched, as the earth was shifting beneath our feet.

In September 2008, I did an interview with Grace Jones. We met in a chi-chi bar-restaurant in Notting Hill that had lots of small rooms and sparkly fairy lights. It was a Monday night. Grace was hours late – her manager and I had a lovely meal while we waited – and, after she arrived, insisted on smoking, which made the waiters mad. At the end of the interview, which wasn’t really an interview but an oblique chat in which Grace drank red wine, shouted, ‘I am the ink in the squid,’ and waggled her legs at me so I could feel how skinny her ankles were – anyway, at the end of that, we went to the bar.

Grace paid for the meal in cash (the only pop star I’ve ever interviewed who has done so) and ordered Sambuca for us both. She said, ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost,’ and we biffed the drinks. Then she stuck her tongue down my throat: an unexpected move, which made me burst out laughing. Her lips were very soft. Grace stroked my face and grabbed my breast and said, ‘It’s a full moon, I feel horrrrrny’ (to be fair, she had shouted this all evening). She wondered if I wanted to come to her hotel, and when I did not, she didn’t seem that bothered.

She gave me her phone number. ‘File it under Grrrr,’ she said, so I did.

I helped her down the stairs – she was very drunk, did I mention? – and we went out into the wide Notting Hill street, the buildings like glistening celebration cakes, the street empty and quiet. Grace ran down the middle of the road, her arms stretched wide, her black outfit billowing around her, howling at the moon.

I thought: They don’t make pop stars like that any more.

(They don’t. We don’t. Do we still want them?)

As Grace ran and howled, without apology, in London, over in New York Lehman Brothers was collapsing. Suddenly, the world of money imploded and shrank, and everything in its orbit got sucked into its black hole, never to escape.

All the bubbles were bursting. There was an election and the coalition got in. The day before the election, I’d interviewed Gordon Brown, prime minister incumbent, for the Mirror. I’d gone to the seaside, where he’d made a great speech. But he was impatient during our interview, which, for reasons I forget, took place in a static helicopter in the middle of a field. Afterwards, we had our photograph taken together. Then Brown took off in his helicopter, leaving me and the photographer alone. In a field. We had to find a taxi and file on the hoof. I transcribed the interview on a train, bashed it out in Starbucks. But I couldn’t get the Starbucks internet to work on my laptop. My editor started shouting at me down the phone.

I asked a young techy guy if I could hop onto his wi-fi so I could file my copy.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What’s the article about?’

I told him.

‘Who’s Gordon Brown?’ he asked.

I used to tell this story as an anecdote, a tale of the young and stupid, like a joke. I now think the butt of the joke wasn’t the techy guy but me. Old-fashioned me, stranded in a field, rushing to a café, borrowing a dongle, writing about an already-forgotten Labour politician for a left-wing printed newspaper.

Money had changed. It no longer seemed to be real. Instead of it adding and subtracting in a way I understood, it had become a slippery, unsolid commodity. Work, too, was becoming less easy to comprehend, its relationships – between employer and worker, effort and resulting pay – becoming murky and unclear. Also, who owned what was done? Contracts were drawn up that gave employers rights over everything made, whether on the net, across the universe, across time, forever.

We were brought up in a world where jobs for life were rare. But they existed (teachers, council workers), and stability was accepted. Even when Thatcher destroyed the unions, dismantled the mining communities, she herself remained. She didn’t budge. She stayed for years, to be followed by Major, who stayed almost as long. We thought New Labour would do the same, but it collapsed so quickly; disappeared, black-holed.

When I was young, my mum and dad worked hard, and were paid for what they did. The maths of their money worked: when they’d paid the bills and there was money left over, we went on holiday. When there wasn’t, we didn’t. We never went out for meals, but we didn’t care about that. At university, if I went more than two hundred pounds overdrawn, the bank wouldn’t give me any cash. I had to negotiate long and hard to get fifty pounds a week, which I got by turning up at a particular branch on a Monday and writing a cheque.

Those years seem so close. But they are a decade away, more.

Hitting 40 wasn’t momentous. I remember feeling a small twinge of something – fear? Regret? Reflux? – but then I went to see Jarvis Cocker play a solo show and thought, He’s older than me, and he’s still great. It’s not the birthday that matters: it’s whatever is going on at the time of the birthday. And at that time, things were OK.

P was small, but there was only one of him and he wasn’t at school, so we could warp and weave our lives around him pretty easily. He was difficult but, in hindsight, only in the way that babies are. He didn’t do what I thought he would do (I think I thought he would act like a small child); scarily, he didn’t do what the books said. He cried a lot. In the mornings, after breakfast, we would put him on a play mat and after a while he would cry. So we would try everything to make him stop: play him music, pick him up, jig him about, put him in his chair, dance about in front of him, give him a jangly toy, maybe some food. Nothing worked. And then someone said, ‘Put him back to bed for a nap,’ and that worked.

We were applying hectic solutions to a non-hectic situation, because that was how we’d lived up until then. We were still narcissistic enough to believe that a child was an extension of our personalities (he’ll love staying up late, because we do; he’ll love company for the same reason; he’ll like this music because we played it a lot when I was pregnant; oh, look, he’s a champion burper – it’s a family trait). He lived to our timetable and that timetable remained flexible. Having a child stopped our late nights, mostly; but the major life rhythms, the when and where we were doing what we did, they were still as up and down as we were, as varied as the state of our finances. P seemed to fit in well.

I shared my fortieth birthday do. Two friends and I took over a pub, including the downstairs dance floor. It was a great party. Afterwards, I lay on the pavement outside and stared at the stars, searching out their sparkle between the high rises, looking past the restricted view, out to the enormous sky.

Between 2000 and 2010, I didn’t move house once. I got married, I gave birth to two children. I acquired and held on to a flat, a microwave and a dishwasher, and a mortgage on that flat. How did that happen? Is this the person I am now? God, how dreary.

5. This is a Low

Here we are now. (Entertain us.)

The dramas of life change when you have children. They expand to the vastness of your terrified imagination. They reduce to the size of a raggedy toy cat.

‘Where’s Kitty?’ wails F.

‘What’s she lost?’ whispers S. ‘That grey rat thing?’

‘Cat, not rat,’ I say. ‘Kitty.’

These dramas take up time, and mind-space. They don’t leave much room for your own. This can be a good thing – gone are the hours spent worrying about what you said at a party, mostly because you don’t go to parties – but also frustrating, when your own drama is about trying to work out where you’re at. And how to go on from there.

I am fitting my drama into specified time slots. I have read that this is one of the best ways to approach unmanageable concerns, to contain the things in the day that keep you awake at night. In the mornings, you consider your anxieties, examine them properly for twenty minutes, then you store them and get on with your day. I contemplate my fears. I’m unsure how deep I should go, how dark and twisted, how specific (unemployment, divorce, the loss of The Point). Or should I be grateful for them, tell them I’m happy they’ve come into my life? Hold them in my virtual hand, before rolling them up like socks and putting them away tidily in their drawer – the virtual drama drawer (next to the wardrobe of worries)?

The next hour is spent frantically opening real-life drawers and boxes, untidying rooms, checking pockets, under sofas, trying to find a grey toy cat.

In the British Library, I am researching my drama.

In 1965, Canadian psychoanalyst and psychologist Elliot Jaques coined the now much-used epithet ‘midlife crisis’. Jaques interviewed a group of successful people and realized that many were feeling the effects of reaching a central point in their working lives. They were confused, disappointed. They’d arrived at their central point to find it was not a high spot, but a dip. Maybe even a spiral. He defined this new crisis as what happened when high achievers hit middle age and feel tortured because of ‘unrealized goals, lack of self-determination or physical changes’. It being the 60s, the midlife point was assumed to be between 30 and 35, and the high achievers Jaques surveyed were men.

Though Jaques named it, and nicely, the idea of a critical moment of change at life’s central age had been knocking around for quite a while. Literature loves the idea of a failing, flailing fellow in his middle years, and Carl Jung, through his work in the 1930s, believed that the midlife stage was vital to human development. ‘The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion,’ wrote Jung. We want this, he said, even though it can’t happen: ‘We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.’

Jung believed there should be colleges for 40-year-olds, institutions of learning to help us get through the painful transition to full maturity. I like this idea. The Middle-aged University. A place to study your navel, if you can still locate it, Chunky.

When I type ‘midlife crisis’ into the British Library search engine, I get 359 returns. Some are songs – ‘Midlife Crisis Blues’ by Jon Scott Cree, ‘Mid Life Crisis All The Time’ by the Cowboy Killers, ‘Mid Life Crisis’ by Faith No More. There are blogs and websites (midlifecyclist.com). There are research papers.

It’s noticeable that references to midlife crisis seem to increase exponentially as the dates become more recent. There is a handful of books and publications in the 60s, a few more in the 70s and 80s. But from the 90s onwards, midlife crisis is so widely understood that it’s used to apply to almost anything. Articles examine the MLC of the Bush administration, the World Health Organization, Indian technology firms, North West Syria. Even outer space: ‘The Ultimate Mid-Life Crisis: Active Accretion of Gas and Dust and Planet-formation Around Old Stars’. Middle age means that once-twinkly stars get weighed down by too much stuff, by family closing in on them.

As the decades progress, not only do midlife books become more numerous, they change in tone. After 2000, they are almost always funny, extended merriment concerning trousers with elasticated waistbands and grumpiness about modern music. These books are about men, and often written by someone called Mike. There’s The Full English, Pedalling Through England, Midlife Crisis and Truly Rampant Man Flu by Mike Carden, out in 2007. Uneasy Rider: Travels Through A Midlife Crisis, Mike Carter, 2008. So You’re Having a Midlife Crisis! Mike Haskins and Clive Whichelow, 2009.

In the 70s and 80s, books about the angst of the middle years took the topic seriously. These days, the idea of midlife crisis is no longer serious at all.

Jung preferred ‘transition’ to crisis, but after Jaques, midlife crisis became the most common phrase to describe the tribulations of the middle years, and the term was quickly expanded to include women.

Female writers tackled the subject. One of the most influential books was Passages, by Gail Sheehy, a journalist who was moved to write about the different stages of life when she covered Bloody Sunday and a young lad was shot dead right next to her. It triggered a sort of breakdown, a ‘whither life and what does it mean’ epiphany – a reasonable reaction, let’s face it – and she interviewed a lot of couples at different stages of their lives in order to work out a pattern for living. Much later, she wrote an updated version, a whole new book, called New Passages.

She wrote this version because in her original book, and other middle-ish books of the time, the assumptions around a woman’s life were very different from today’s. Then, marriage happened in your early twenties, kids followed soon after and you stayed at home to look after them and your husband. The midlife crisis of a woman in the 70s and 80s was assumed to happen after her children stopped needing her, and she was left to dust a lonely house for thirty to forty years.

Prime Time, by Helen Franks, which came out in 1981, looks at women between their mid-thirties and mid-fifties. In it, she describes a woman ‘no longer burdened by domesticity and childrearing’ who has the time ‘for emotional stock-taking, a re-examining of beliefs’. She tentatively suggests that such a woman might want to take on some paid work of her own. But many of her subjects are held back from entering employment by their lack of experience, their years of wife-and-mother work. And, shockingly, by their husbands, who want to keep their wives at home, making hot meals and organizing the ornaments, even though they’re out all day and the kids have left. Franks writes about a New York psychologist who held workshops for middle-aged women. Not to help them cope with their own midlife crisis but to learn how to cope with their husbands’.

Also in the 80s, Jim Conway, a US pastor, wrote several books about midlife crisis, including one on the midlife crisis of men, and another, with his wife Sally, on the female version. The books are great at pinpointing the feelings of intense inadequacy in men in their forties, the desire to jack everything in – family, work, house – and go driving across the country … But they are not so hot on their wives.

In Women In Midlife Crisis, Conway (Jim) writes this: ‘When I was going through my midlife crisis, Sally was teaching school Monday through Friday. My day off was Monday. In order to be available to be with me, Sally resigned from teaching so that we could get away more frequently for the recuperation and reflection time that I needed.’ Good old Sally, eh? Must have loved those jolly Mondays.

Pauline Bart made a study of 533 American women aged between 40 and 55, who were in psychiatric hospitals for depression but had no history of mental illness. Her conclusion was that the women were depressed because they ‘had lost the companionship of their children, they had fewer people to shop or cook or clean for, they had been brought up to fulfil themselves through their homes and families, they had no qualifications, had gained no work experience for many years, had no confidence, low self-esteem and nothing to look forward to’. It was 1971. At that time, the greatest users of anti-anxiety drugs were women aged between 45 and 54.

I read William Bridges’ Transitions, Making Sense of Life’s Changes. In it, a man says: ‘I feel as though my whole life was built on a frozen lake. We all go on with our activities. We work on the house and play golf and entertain and have our fights. I put in long hours at work and think I’m doing well. Then every once in a while I think, This is ice I’m standing on, and it’s melting – or Was that a crack I heard just then? I try to forget, but I keep thinking, Damn, that ice looks thin!’

I read The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, by James Hollis. He writes, ‘Anyone in midlife has witnessed the collapsing of projections, of hopes and expectations, and has experienced the limitations of talent, intelligence and, often, of courage itself.’

I look up funny quotes. ‘Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall’: Joseph Campbell. ‘The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you’ll grow out of it’: Doris Day.

I think about how to write this book. I think: Wouldn’t it be great if the book itself had a midlife crisis? If it collapsed in the middle, started doubting itself and the way it had gone about its life so far?

Why are there so many funny midlife books these days? Has midlife crisis become so ingrained as a cultural joke that it’s hard not to mention it without us laughing? It’s like saying ‘farty poo bum’ to a five-year-old, or showing a picture of a dial-phone to a teenager. Ho ho, I know this one. The very concept is hilarious.

I say to people, ‘I’m writing a book on midlife crisis,’ to see if they laugh. They do. Some of them say, ‘Hey, interview me!’ Some say, ‘Interview him!’ and point to their friend or husband. But all of them laugh. Then they define themselves against it. They haven’t bought a sports car (they’ve bought a fixed-wheel bike). They’re not leaving their wife for the twenty-something secretary (she’s in PR and she’s 31). They’re not stuck in the same job they’ve always had (they’ve started teaching younger people how to do that job). They’re still in love with their partner (they just don’t have sex). Ha ha ha.

After a while, I realize they’re trying to hide their embarrassment. We are easily shamed in the UK and middle age is so cringe-making that we have to deflect it with a joke. Not only because to admit that you care about it is to admit a reprehensible weakness of character – can’t you go marching gladly into your middle years without making such a fuss? – but also because we will not accept that we have anything to do with the crisis part, that uncool state of being.

And so we all define ourselves against it. I say ‘midlife crisis’ to people and they point at others. Or they pick out the easy parts: the buying of gadgetry, their kids becoming obsessed with their old vinyl. They deny that the truths of middle age, the darker implications, might actually apply.

I wonder, though, if the jokes are getting in the way. They help us skim over the sadness, they mask our bewilderment, and the other option – despair – is hardly appealing. But the MLC jokes remind me of other funnies, the ancient ones, the take-my-mother-in-law gags, the anti-gay or racist one-liners. Comedy shows us where our fears lie.

I have a meeting with a TV commissioning editor. He laughs and says, ‘I don’t believe midlife crisis exists!’ He is wearing an earring, has split up with his wife and is dating someone fifteen years younger. I should have asked him if he had a new bike.

‘Have you had a midlife crisis?’ I ask S, who is a bit older than me. He was married before, and has two older children, who are adults themselves now, married, settled down.

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘I had my crisis when I was 21. When D was born. Dad said to me at the time,’ (I know this story), ‘“Ah, the toothpaste’s out of the tube now, son.” You can’t push a baby back inside. You bring a child into the world and your life stops being about you.’

Yes, but that’s part of it, I think. The terror, and the tedium, and the sheer delight of your children. And you, knowing they will go.

I keep reading. It turns out that there are a lot of people – distinguished academics, psychotherapists – who insist that midlife crisis is not a thing. After all, unrealized goals, lack of self-determination and physical changes are not problems exclusive to forty-somethings: you can run up against them at any stage in your life. The academics point out that middle age is tricky, busy, overwhelming, but that doesn’t mean there’s a crisis. Nothing to see here. It’s just middle age.

Also, a crisis tends to be triggered by an event: a parent dying; losing your job; a long-term relationship breaking up; having a child, or the children leaving home. Any one of these upsets can trigger a sudden shift in thinking, a shaking of the foundations of your life. Which is what happened to S, in his early twenties.

But S is becoming an anomaly. These days, more children are born to women of 35 and over than to women under 25. And most of these crisis-triggering events occur around middle age, that busy time.

And, like I say, we make jokes about midlife crisis. This is the greatest evidence for its existence. Jokes are how the British acknowledge anything fundamental. If it wasn’t important, we wouldn’t be laughing about it.

Somewhere inside, I seem to believe that middle age should be the pinnacle of life, the moment when all your previous efforts add up to something meaningful and you find yourself at the top of the mountain. I mention this to a friend, psychotherapist Philippa Perry, and she says: ‘That’s only a metaphor. Why not change it?’

For a while I try to imagine life as a long climb to the ultimate summit. But then I start noticing all the studies that indicate a different shape. Every time I find a piece of empirical research, it insists that, when it comes to our lives, happiness is U-shaped. Across several nations (Australia, Germany, the UK, others) the saddest time is in middle age. We’re full of joy when very young and very old, but struggle badly with the time in the centre. We go through our forties at our lowest psychological ebb. Some of the studies pinpoint 47 as our unhappiest age; some say 44. But it’s always in our forties.

Other research has found that great apes – chimpanzees and orangutans – have a similar life pattern. At the end of 2012, a global team (from Edinburgh, Arizona and Kyoto) studied 508 orangutans and chimpanzees and discovered that they suffer from middle-aged angst. As the apes live to around 55, they have their crisis in their late twenties.

Andrew J. Oswald, an economics professor from the University of Warwick, writes: ‘It seems the curve of happiness should no longer be considered a social and economic phenomenon, the preserve of economists, sociologists, social psychologists, psychiatrists or mysticists. Instead, intriguingly, the U shape appears to be so deep within us that it may need a natural sciences explanation.’ Not a crisis, then, a life condition.

More research. Pile it on. Let the book have its breakdown, with me. Let it look at itself and unpick what it sees. Give us the bad stats.

The average age at divorce is 45 for men, 42 for women. In 1970, most divorces happened to people aged between 25 and 29. In 2012, the number of divorces was highest among men and women aged 40 to 45; 65 per cent of divorces are instigated by women; 42 per cent of marriages will end in divorce, after, on average, 11 years.

Adults aged 45-plus are three times as likely as those under 45 to drink every day. Between 1991 and 2008, alcohol-related deaths in the 35–54 age group doubled in number. The percentage of 45–55-year-olds who take cocaine has doubled in a decade. Nearly a quarter of all drink and drug hospital admissions are of people in their forties.

Among marathon-runners, a study shows, 49-year-old men are at the greatest risk of suffering a heart attack; 93 per cent of such attacks occurred in men whose average age was 49. Other studies demonstrate that what is named as ‘pure exercise dependence’ is found most often in men in their forties and fifties.

Almost half of the long-term unemployed (47.2 per cent) are over 50.

There are two age spikes in male suicides in the UK: when men are in their early twenties and early forties. There has been quite a lot of notice taken of those in the younger group, but less support is offered to potentially suicidal middle-aged men. Because, you know, they’re middle-aged men. They’re the powerful ones, surely.

The bad stats. The dip to sadness.

We all want to be happy. But middle age, the time of money problems, of work responsibilities and looming insecurities, of boredom and frustration and a lack of self-realization, of caring for those younger and older than ourselves, of diminishing fitness, energy and relevance: that doesn’t always seem like such a happy place.

6. Jealous

I bring up the question of middle age with almost everyone I meet. People tell me odd, illuminating stories that help.

One man I talk to says he had a ‘massive’ crisis a few years ago, when he was in his early forties. It was a nervous breakdown, really, triggered by him splitting up from a long-term girlfriend, but it manifested itself in extreme, searing envy. Of people he didn’t know; of people he knew well. He had to give up seeing several of his oldest friends for a time because, in his eyes, they had everything and he had nothing and he couldn’t hang out with them any more because it was making him so unhappy.

What is unusual about his story was that he was a millionaire. But his cash didn’t help his crisis. This man wanted what his friends had – what I have: a partner and kids. Money made no difference to his situation.

I enjoy this story (the man is no longer in pain), not because it reveals that what everyone wants is to be loved but because I’m down to my last couple of hundred. It affirms what I pretend are my choices: to be married, to have kids, not to have thousands of pounds hanging around in my bank account. Ha! I think. I knew money didn’t bring you happiness! All my favourite books and films told me this. Religion too: Jesus turning over the rich men’s tables in the temple. They all insisted that being not-rich equates with being good. So the reason I haven’t earned millions is because I’m a morally superior person. It has nothing to do with me not having the requisite talent to earn a huge amount, or not caring enough to barter down prices, or not being able to keep hold of money when I have it instead of spending it in the wrong places.

Of course, if I didn’t care about money, I wouldn’t be thinking like this.

Money is part of life, and it should be thought about, as should jealousy. The story is about the man being jealous of his friends’ lives, and also about me being jealous of his.

A story about money.

In my late thirties, I was offered a chunk of cash by a publisher to write a book about Madonna, in honour of her turning 50. Very, very occasionally, S will remind me of this, our non-existent ‘Madonna patio money’. If I’d been able to work out how to write the book, we would be living in a house with a patio, possibly a small area of grass, maybe even – I know, I know – decking.

But I couldn’t bring myself to write 120,000 words about a famous person without some form of cooperation from that person, and Madonna was never going to give me any. I got in touch with a few people she’d worked with, set up some interviews, but when I approached her official representatives, the answer was no. So how would I write the book? Would I need to go through her bins? Did she even have bins? I’d have to follow her around as she got on with her impenetrable life, as she zipped across the world on prearranged schedules I would never be party to. I’d talk to security guards and fans and people who went to the same school as she did forty years ago, to anyone but the inner circle, and what would be the point? I would hate myself and it wouldn’t be the book the publishers wanted.

P was only a baby and I didn’t want to go away for weeks on end, and I didn’t want to write about someone who didn’t want me to write about them.

I gave back the advance. The book didn’t happen. Life went on.

My attitude to money has changed. In my teens and twenties, money was a means to an end. I would work hard for a bit, earn enough to do what I wanted, and then I would stop working to go and do it. Mostly, this involved going away. You don’t need much cash to do that.

Once I had the flight or the ferry ticket, once I jumped on the bus, everything else was fine. If I didn’t have anywhere to stay, I met people who knew a place to crash, or I slept in doorways, or stations (legs inside sleeping bag, money in socks, head on bag, arm crooked through the strap), or on abandoned pallets, or a beach, or I used a tent or crept into abandoned storage containers. I’ve crashed out in the railway station at Milan (after 2 a.m., the police moved us outside the station, to sleep on the pavement in the doorway). Under a bench in a public park in Zürich. On a rock on Lampedusa (all the beaches were sand-less, covered with jagged volcanic outcrops). All fine, because I had somewhere to stretch out and I was usually with a friend.

When I went away then, a lot of time was spent on the basics: where we were going to sleep, what we would eat, how we would get to the next place. No matter who I was with, we would somehow spend all the money we had in the first three days, then survive for weeks. Not having money made us resourceful: we would scour markets as they shut, pick up wonky vegetables, snaffle stale bread. We’d talk our way into nightclubs and then nick drinks, eat free tapas and nibbles put out on bars. We would find hash, smoke some of it and swap the rest for food. We would jump trains on scuffed-up, rewritten tickets. We would accept evenings out from men we knew probably wanted to sleep with us, just to get fed, and then we would run away. We would get by on charm and noisiness. We were young.

At the moment, I have to stop myself getting agitated about where we live. I blame TV property shows, stimulating a long-dormant home-improvement gene. Also: envy. My middle-aged emptiness, my inside absence, has become epitomized by another absence, the lack of a small patch of concrete in which we could shove some mouldy pot plants and P could practise his football skills. The Madonna patio. We can’t afford to buy a house with a garden in the area where we live because we live in London, and since the bank and I bought our flat in 1999, house prices have soared like someone’s spinning numbers on a roulette wheel. We would have to borrow twice as much as I borrowed for the flat in the first place, and the bank won’t give us that, because we’re freelance and we don’t earn enough money per year. Also, we’re too old. Add twenty-five years to my age and you’re way past retirement.

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