‘I started out with the best intentions. I could see where my career was heading and it looked good. I married a nice woman and we have two kids. We also have an allotment. Does that mean I’m ripe for a mid-life crisis?
‘My job has taken me up and down England. I’ve lived in fashionable areas and the wrong side of the railway tracks. I’ve been a commuter. I’ve lived in a seaside let, a new-build detached, an over-the-office flat. I can’t complain about any of those. I did notice that I was not as young as I used to be. I felt a fraud in a Father Christmas outfit. Then I thought it rather suited me. I got used to being beaten at chess by the younger members of the family. I realised that they were taking me to a football match rather than me taking them.
‘Yes, I’ve got a shed. I keep my spares, seedlings, tools, engine-oil and lawn-mower in it. It also has an easy chair, so I have all I need to rebuild the world. Oil companies, nation-states, aero-space labs: they all gain my attention but BP, Costa Rica, NASA have managed to get along without me so far and I’m not expecting a call any moment.
‘Church? Yes, I suppose I belong in a half-hearted way. Whenever I go (not very often), I find I’m the youngest person there. Nobody is interested in any opinion I may have on the being or otherwise of a Maker. They all seem to be tied up with questions of re-organising the church machinery or what vicars wear in church. Those of us who find it difficult enough to survive in the modern world, let alone pay homage to the one who’s responsible for it all, don’t get much help from that.
‘I don’t feel at home with the country I was born in. It’s changed. It’s not just that men wear baseball caps rather than trilbies or fedoras. It’s not the prominence of USA stuff on television. (I think ‘Law and Order’ is one of the best things we see.) It’s not the switch in school history and literature from William the Conqueror and Queen Anne to Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi. It’s the feeling of being side-lined, marginalised.
‘So. I have a mid-life crisis. I don’t expect help from the church or the Open University or holidays in historic locations. I’ll just get on with it as best I can.’
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