A guest post this week from my dear friend and fellow Substacker . Chris writes the ‘9 Holidays I Wish I’d Never Been on Substack’ which comes recommended. Enjoy - Old Captain Ennui will be back next week.
I’ve decided to write a new musical. It will be my fourth. It will be called ‘Mid Life Crisis the Musical’ and concerns a man’s decisions, in his 50th year to write his fourth musical about a man writing musicals in 50s. I’ve already written the first number.
It’s called…
“Oh No. I’ve just bought four Kayaks on Ebay.co.uk
for me and my family but no one wants to go.’
I write about men in trouble. I do so because I am a man in trouble. My own childhood was catastrophic, full of black eyes and screaming that you hear from your bed that you’ve wet in the morning. My life’s mission has been to be the wall between the shame which happened and all the life to come. At some points that has meant weighing 21 stone but not presently.
My own son is now almost 18. Nearly a grown man. To quote Homer (the Greek one), he has ‘youth’s first beard’ and has a full head of brown hair that looks like a mushroom like all the other boys his age. When I see him come in late having had some underage pints at the pub, I take joy in it. You’re a bit drunk, I think, but no PTSD for you. You’re attached to your mum which is so very good even though we are no longer together. You’re having fun. You’re not a man in trouble. My words are not for you yet. It is many years before you have to write your first musical. Thank God.
The first piece that I wrote about men’s issues was a podcast. It was a docudrama about the shooting and blinding of PC David Rathband in 2010. It was that moment in UK culture when everyone was getting used to social media for the first time. I recreated the last 20 months of his life in 153 fragments of social media, which matched the number of shotgun fragments they removed from his face. I followed his digital vapour trail all the way back to the black box in the cockpit to ask why he had taken his life. He took his own life when the physical pain combined with the fury of the realisation of what had been taken from him, and the monumental effort it would take to get used to his own darkness. I learnt the deep lesson that anger either goes outwards or it goes inwards. Never let it go inwards if you can help it.
I also learnt that social media platforms offer a type of storytelling that is more female than male. More Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz making friends to defeat her enemies than Luke Skywalker using a lightsaber to defeat his. The #metoo movement could have happened nowhere else. A story on social media isn’t a true story until it has gone viral in some way and it is the virality which makes it true. The friends a story makes over the process of being told, in this analysis, themselves make up 50% of the story.
The ever-brilliant Deborah Tannen points out in her book ‘You Just Don’t Understand’ that ‘Women approach the world as individuals in a world of connections’. In this world conversations are negotiations for closeness, in which people try and seek and give confirmation and support and to reach consensus. There are hierarchies in this world but they are the hierarchies of friendship.
Men in comparison approach the world as an individual in a hierarchical order. Conversations are negotiations in which people try and achieve the upper hand if they can. They protect themselves from any attempt to put them down and push them around. Life for men is a contest, a struggle to preserve independence and avoid failure.
Conclusion: To feel better, men should try and stay away from Social Media as it is a technology whose affordances will place them in a hierarchical order where they cannot achieve their biological aim. They should write musicals instead.
Musicals, meanwhile, are a form that middle-aged men can excel in. It is a form that can contain all their myriad of emotions, from lustful desires to walk the Trans Pennine way for no reason, to collecting toys from the 1980s. You don’t have to know music, I can’t write a note, yet I have not let that stop me. Indeed, I suggest a lack of musical ability is an advantage for the composer so as not to feel the pressure of competition with others. Personally, I have written three musicals in my 40s. I have always found other people who can do the music part.
Conclusion: Don’t let lack of ability stop you. I give you full permission to have none of the skills but all the desire.
The most successful musical I did was a ‘Drum and Bass Musical About Eating Disorders’ called Cassie and Corey. It was about a massive teenager-in-trouble who does a runner before his gastric band operation on a motorised scooter. It won two British Podcast Awards for Wellbeing and Drama.
More recently, I’ve been writing a memoir. It is called ‘9 Holidays I wish I’d never Been On’ and concerns what I did to survive in this world from 1978-1988. It is a riches to rags story about growing up in a gangster home and running away. This time I am writing about not a man but a boy in trouble. I am doing this because I feel boys are in trouble today. They are growing up a dark shadow of a cultural zeitgeist where their boyhood is a toxic original sin. No wonder they make such noise. It is the noise of the ignored.
It is acceptable to be a boy.
I tried saying that at a university meeting where I work and people Googled my name to see if I was a member of the far-right. Other colleagues looked at me you as if to say, ‘Why on earth are you talking about boys?’. One man found an excuse to leave the room. If you have a moment, let the stats speak calmly to you.
Homelessness
86% of rough sleepers in England are male
84% of the “hidden homeless” are male
In England between 2001-2009, men were 90% of those who died while homeless
From 2013 to 2017, the number of UK homeless people who died each year more than doubled, 90% of which were men.
Imprisonment
There are around 85,000 prisoners in England and Wales, 95% of whom are male
Men are more likely to be sent to prison and receive longer sentences than women for the same crimes.
Victims of violence
Men are nearly twice as likely as women to be a victim of violent crime and among children, boys are more likely than girls to be victims of violence
Over two thirds of murder victims are male
Men make up 73% of robbery victims
98.6% of UK military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were male
Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence
In 2018/19 – 786,000 men (1.6 million women) suffered from Domestic Abuse – one in three victims are male ONS.
In terms of partner abuse, 576,000 men suffered from this (less than 1.196 million women).
Only 51% of men tell anyone they are a victim of domestic abuse (81% of women tell someone).
For refuges/safe houses there are currently 37 organisations with 204 spaces with only 40 of those places are dedicated for men. Many parts of the UK have no or limited places at all.
(Statistics via Men and Boys Coalition)
Writing a memoir, I’ve learnt, isn’t therapeutic in a classic sense. As an act of organisation it is helpful in putting order into an internal chaos. Therapy involves a relationship of some kind. You create a new intelligence jointly in the room. However, as I recounted my story to the world, a strange desire came over me. It was the desire to create equal and opposite experiences to things that had hurt me. I knew by the end that I had to create a bucket-list of experiences of amends to myself.
So that’s my final advice in this guest post, create a bucket list of experiences that doesn’t include mindfulness or meditation, but that teaches your nervous system the experiences it should have had. Sometimes you can’t talk your way out of stuff; you have to experience your way out. Send me your list if you like. I’d be happy to read it and turn it into a song about what you want in my next musical number in ‘Midlife Crisis the Musical.’