Wild life
Mid-life crisis
Aidan Hartley on why life is going to be different from now on
I had an epiphany at 5.30 a.m. the other day in a Shanghai club packed with gangsters, prostitutes and flat-bellied Thai transsexuals. I watched a little guy, in his forties like me, dancing with two women dressed as schoolgirls. Then he collapsed drunkenly to the floor. White-jacketed attendants appeared. Instead of ejecting the man, they gently restored him to his tarts and whisky at the bar. His needs were understood. ‘In Shanghai nobody that age had fun when they were young, before China reformed,’ said a friend showing me the city. ‘Now they have money, everybody’s trying to have a good time before they’re too old.’
I walked out of there deciding my mid-life crisis had begun. I have been in a crisis of one sort or another since prep school, but in several ways this state of emergency is different. For example, I notice how conversations with friends of my age increasingly celebrate our failures as much as our future hopes. We are embarking on what the novelist Edward St Aubyn calls ‘the retreat from Moscow’. It’s not over yet, but we know it’s going to get messy.
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Deeznia
December 1st, 2007 9:24amhahaha...Aidan very funny and insightful too. Insightful into the life of a mature male i would say.