It was uncanny, discomfiting, even a little bit alarming. He seemed to be reading my mind, as if my thoughts were being hurled back at me through the ether. Why are we so tired? Why does it feel as though time itself is speeding up, making midlife so much more nerve-wracking an experience than it might otherwise be? Why do you never hear a middle-aged person talking about being bored? Toby Longworth was reading from Marcus Berkmann’s new book, A Shed of One’s Own: Midlife Without the Crisis, for Book of the Week on Radio 4 on Monday morning.
A man, according to Berkmann, who usually writes about music and for this magazine, must have a shed. It’s the only way to deal with the gradual onset of middle age, when if you’re really honest all you want to do is nothing at all. You don’t need a garden for this shed, or have aspirations to grow tomatoes, tobacco, the despised cucumber. Your shed can be ‘virtual’, a room, an office, a shed in the mind, but it must allow its occupant that most precious thing — the appearance of thinking about something when actually you’re not thinking about anything at all. For the shed is where you indulge in ‘directed idleness’, and rediscover those ‘small purposes’ of which true pleasure is made.
Not much attention was paid by Berkmann to what the other half of the human race is supposed to do while said males are ensconced in their sheds. Who’s going to shop for dinner? Put out the rubbish? Drive Timothy to tae kwon do? But I can almost forgive Berkmann for this failure of nerve. He was just so spot-on about that strange moment in midlife when you suddenly find yourself no longer able to connect with the younger model that was you in your twenties, when ambition, purpose, direction were all ahead of you, not behind you.
As Toby Longworth read these words on Day One, you could tell he was not convinced by them, but gradually Berkmann’s rhythmic dancing prose began to have an effect on him so that by the time he came to ‘We’re all so angry, all so suspicious…’ it was as if he, too, was by now one of the converted. He, too, wanted that shed.
‘Once you’ve said “Turn it down” to a stranger, once you’ve put yourself beyond the pale of raucous society, you experience a sense of liberation,’ declared Andrew Martin on Day Two of his blast against noise for Radio 3’s The Essay. Martin says he became ‘phonophobic’ (someone with a hatred of noise) when living in Brixton in the early 1990s and having as close neighbours two barking dogs. After nine months he was prepared to throw an ice cube infused with poison over the wall into the dogs’ water bowl.
It was at this time that he became addicted to earplugs, and then to a pair of fans which he now keeps on throughout the night, the ceaseless whirring of the blades providing a kind of white noise that shuts out all other sound. Shortly afterwards Martin heard himself asking a pub landlord to turn down the CD he was playing. He knew instantly this had turned him into a weirdo from the look the landlord gave him: a cross between amusement and bemusement.
As I was listening to Martin delivering his thoughts (on a preview CD) yet another drill started up across the road. Fast broadband for the new neighbours. I withstood the relentless boring for about half an hour before finding myself walking out of the front door, into the street, and asking the workmen why on earth their drill didn’t have a silencer. It didn’t. Really, it didn’t. Why, too, hadn’t their employer provided them with ear mufflers? That’s the trouble with this kind of curmudgeonly pessimism. It’s highly infectious — and especially at this time of year.
Back on Radio 4 I discovered, with relief, that Liz Lochhead, the Scots makar, whose ear for dialogue and sense of the absurd gives the lie to the notion of the Scots as dour and humourless, had dramatised a play for Burns Night for Radio 4. Burns and the Bankers (Wednesday), a comedy drama by Helen Simpson (produced and directed by Amber Barnfather), also had a starry cast in John Sessions, Greg Wise and the brilliantly adept Sophie Thompson.
Nicola, a high-flying English lawyer and working mum, is attending a corporate Burns Night supper at the Caledonian Club in London. As the evening drags on, she is most unwillingly drawn into an appreciation of Burns’s poetry. ‘Imagine,’ mutters Nicola, after discovering that she’s about to eat the liver, lights and windpipe of a sheep all wrapped up in its stomach, ‘sitting all smug and patriotic and ridiculous over a pile of tweedy-looking, greyish-brown morsels.’
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