One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Read online

  My partner is so kind it causes her physical pain to say something that might wound. She squirmed as though she was standing in a bathtub of electric eels.

  “Oh, do you think it’s a bit small for me?”

  “It’s not that it’s small …”

  “No, no, don’t worry, I’m going to lose the weight.”

  “Oh?” she said weakly.

  “Definitely. I’ll be a medium again. Most definitely.”

  “Okay …”

  “Yup. I was going to tell you. I’m going on a diet.”

  Diary of a diet

  The first thing you notice about the Tim Noakes diet is how interesting it is to talk about. Actually, that’s not true. The very first thing you notice is it’s not at all interesting to talk about, but that’s only when you’re not on the diet yourself.

  When you’re the one living your life as a normal human being, peaceably eating as your forefathers did and their forefathers before them, you might have a reasonable tolerance for chitchat about what other people are eating. You might even ask a polite question or two of your own.

  “Oh, really?” you might say. “You’re putting butter in your coffee and making toast out of halloumi cheese now? That’s interesting.” Or you might say, “Oh, so then you’re not going to eat those chips? Do you mind if I …?”

  But after a while it becomes irritating to have people constantly volunteering to tell you how much energy they have and how bloated they aren’t. I never realised how bloated everyone was before they all started telling me they aren’t any more. First you roll your eyes, then you start avoiding everyone who has recently lost a suspicious amount of weight.

  “I feel like you’re not being supportive,” said a friend recently.

  “I don’t want to hear about the stupid Tim Noakes diet,” I snapped.

  “I have leukaemia,” she said.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “No, I’m kidding, it’s the Tim Noakes diet. You wouldn’t believe how much energy I have now.”

  “Shut up or I’ll kill you!”

  “I’m still kidding! I had the baby! Sheesh!”

  But then you start it yourself and you realise you were wrong. No, it’s not boring to talk about what you’re eating. In fact it’s fascinating, because there’s so much science in it, you see. The science is the best part. Hoo boy, who knew I loved science so much?

  The other thing you realise is that this is the time of the cauliflower. The cauliflower is taking over the world. Where once there were fields of wheat and corn waving golden in the sun and rustling creepily by night, soon there’ll be just the stubbly scalps of cauli heads. There are cauliflower appreciation groups on Facebook and cauli-loving websites. There’s cauliflower porn. I haven’t seen it myself, you understand – those freaks aren’t getting my credit card number – but sure, I’ll admit it, I’m cauli-curious.

  For a while the cauliflower was content to make a celebrity couple with broccoli – “Broccauli”, the tabloids called them – but then its star grew too bright and it had to go solo. Now you can’t throw a stone without hitting a cauliflower doing something quirky and spectacular. Cauliflower pizza crust! Cauliflower cake! Cauli burgers and popcorn and waffles! Cauliflowers adorably clipped to look like sheep! In time we’ll all look back and wonder how we couldn’t see that Tim Noakes was in the pay of Big Cauli the whole time.

  Day 1

  As it happens, I don’t much care for cauliflower. It looks too much like a brain on a spinal cord, like something you’d feed a vegan zombie, but I’m too excited to worry about that now. The main appeal of the Noakes diet is that it’s a massive plot twist. You’ve been going through life thinking you know the goodies from the baddies, but no! Wait! The call was coming from inside the house! The ones you thought you could trust have betrayed you and your enemy is your one true friend! Potatoes, I shun you! Begone, while I dip this strip of bacon in a creamy blue-cheese-and-goose-fat sauce.

  And when the earnest, dreary, thick-waisted sorts – the kind I was until yesterday – start moaning that it’s untested and the science hasn’t been done and one day my heart and my colon might link arms and go on strike, it’s all the better. I’m a cowboy! I’m a daredevil! I’m eating ribs and cheddar cheese for breakfast and making a smoothie from salami and full-cream milk! I used to have to get these thrills from smoking cigarettes or driving without a seatbelt! I’m a high-ketone test pilot, baby! I have the Right Stuff!

  Day 4

  I’ve encountered my first problem and it’s breakfast. I won’t bore you with the details of my breakfast regime. Unlike your awful friends on Instagram, I don’t assume that you care what I eat for breakfast. In fact, I don’t care if you do care because the fact is, I’m kind of private about it. Breakfast is something I like to keep on a need-to-know basis, and if you aren’t in my breakfast nook in the morning, mister, you don’t need to know.

  Breakfast is a fundamental part of how I make myself each day. You think I get out of bed this way? When I wake of a morning I’m rumpled and unready. To be the smooth put-together man of letters you see before you now, I must compose myself, and breakfast is where it happens. I need to sit quietly with my breakfast and my coffee and remember how to be a human being. Otto von Bismarck, that Oscar Wilde of Germany, once said you should never see how a law or a sausage gets made; think of me as a sausage.

  But it’s tiring to eat a breakfast of only eggs and animal fats. I crave toast. Just a piece of toast with some honey. Maybe a sweet spoon of strawberry jam. When did toast become wicked? Henry Miller used to wake up and drink a glass of whisky. By all that’s godly, how did toast become my whisky?!

  Day 6

  Why is everyone else always eating so many carbohydrates? Are they doing it on purpose? Everyone’s always eating some toast or a muffin. There’s a guy eating a muffin right now, right in my line of sight. I don’t even like muffins, so why can’t I stop staring at that guy’s muffin? Do you think it has apple in it? Tiny bits of succulent, flavoursome, cinnamony apple? Is that what I’m watching, a man eating an apple muffin in front of me? If I kill that man and eat his muffin, will anyone see me? Wait, of course they will. Tim Noakes will see me. Tim Noakes sees everything.

  Day 8

  They’ve done something to protein. They’ve sabotaged protein. Protein has become weird. I used to eat protein like I’m a sabretoothed tiger. Now I hate protein. I’ll say it and I mean it: I never want to see another pork chop.

  Day 11

  What does she mean, I’m being irritable? I’m not being irritable. You would also be irritable if someone was robbing you of your birthright. Rice! Rice is my birthright! I didn’t like rice before this diet, but by god I want some right now. “Are you banting?” someone says to me. No, I’m not banting, you damn fool. “Banting” was a man’s name, not a verb. Asking me if I’m Banting is asking me if I’m some guy who lived a hundred years ago in London. No, I’m not a guy who lived a hundred years ago in London! If you want to use Banting as a verb, it has to be Bantinging. Am I Bantinging? Yes! No! Give me rice!

  Day 15

  God, I’m so depressed. I’m as depressed as a robot who has never eaten rice or toast or pasta. Life has lost its colour. It’s all as grey as a piece of kidney in a steak-and-kidney pie. If I had to buy a pie from the Shell shop right now I’d only be able to eat the bits of steak and the bits of kidney. That’s not living. I’ve lost weight, but so what? I don’t care. My body seems foreign to me. I’m like that guy in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, except I’m not even hungry. I wish I was hungry, because then I’d feel something. Don’t worry, someone says – it’s a side effect, it’ll pass, you’re supposed to be depressed. I’m supposed to be depressed? This is a feeding plan premised on the certainty of my sorrow? Someone else tells me that no depression feels as bad as looking thin feels good. I don’t want that to be true.

  Later on day 15

  When someone asked Sophia Loren how she kept in shape, she answered, “
Pasta.” I haven’t thought about Sophia Loren in years. God, she was beautiful. That was a shape. Someone tells me it’s natural not to eat pasta, because the cavemen didn’t eat pasta. I reply that, well, cavemen aren’t exactly my models for sensible behaviour. Cavemen scribbled on the walls and raped lady cavemen, and no one suggests we start behaving like that, do they? The person says I’m being silly, and that we should give more thought to following ancient ways because what has the modern world given us really, and I start thinking about antibiotics and croissants and cities and laws against rape, and I just know any minute now this lunatic is going to suggest I eat pasta made from courgettes. I don’t want to be the kind of man who eats pasta made from courgettes. I want to be the kind of man who could bump into Sophia Loren in a small trattoria in Napoli and see her dark eyes flash like summer lightning as we share a bowl of spaghetti before making love among the crusty bread and parmesan rinds.

  Understand, I explain to my partner, it’s not that I necessarily want to make love to Sophia Loren, it’s just that I don’t want to be the kind of man that Sophia Loren would automatically never make love to. Sophia Loren’s very attractive, my partner agrees. She didn’t make many good movies, but she didn’t really have to. Then she says, if Sophia Loren didn’t want to make love to you, it would be her loss. Thank you, I say. There’s a long pause, then I say, I look like a damn fool in that shirt, don’t I? I think there are other shirts that you’d look so much better in, she says. Then I say, I’m never going to lose this weight, am I? And she says, Oh honey, I don’t think so.

  2. ANGER

  I was on the sit-up machine the other day. It’s not really a machine, it’s a static arrangement of planes and angles over which you hook your knees and attempt by wincing labour to sit yourself up. It just makes me feel better to call it a machine, as though I’m already in the future and some modern technology is building me a better, faster, stronger, more up-sitting body.

  I don’t like the gym. I don’t like its weird smell, that combination of chlorine and detergent and sweat and fear. I don’t like the clanging and the running and the splashing and the grunting, and I don’t like the way I always think, “Why haven’t I been here for three months? This would be much easier if I wasn’t always starting all over again.”

  But of all the bits of gym I don’t like it’s the sit-up machine I don’t like the most. At least when you’re lifting weights you can pretend something is more or less being achieved. Something is flexing, some heavyish object is moving between two points, something is happening. In your head you can imagine being in a real-life situation – perhaps in a scrapyard looking for clues to a crime the authorities don’t even believe was committed – in which you might one day be called upon to lift or lower a heavy piece of something, and you’ll make a better go at it for having spent these five minutes practising. Perhaps Sophia Loren will be there, and she’ll look at you with her dark eyes and meaningfully eat a peach and you’ll know you’ve made an impression.

  But the sit-up machine is the worst. It’s not an isolated muscle that hurts, it’s your whole internal arrangement. There’s a nameless ache from your groin to your nose. Your organs weep. Places hurt that don’t even know they’re hurting because they have no nerve endings but still experience a deep existential discomfort. And nothing ever improves. No matter what, I’ll never have a six-pack. A six-pack is beyond the purview and competency of the sit-up machine. It doesn’t even really pretend it will affect the shape of my belly: it just offers to strengthen my core, as though I give a good goddamn about my core. I’m a man, not an apple.

  Even worse is how the sit-up machine so clearly winnows out the normal people from the fit. The gymsters are always on it in weird side-saddle arrangements, trying out new configurations, throwing in twists and ecliptics, clutching weights to their chests, sitting on each other’s shoulders. The rest of us wince and strain and whimper, all red-faced and apologetic like senior citizens on a low-fibre diet.

  I’ve spent ten years going to gym, off and on, mostly in the two days before a date or the three weeks after a relationship ends, and I’ve never wasted my time on the sit-up machine before because I know it won’t make any difference. So why am I on it now?

  The answer struck me as I struggled to the top of a sit.

  Oh my god.

  I clutched my knees and wheezed.

  I’m doing this because it’s good for me.

  This is an awful, awful realisation. An invisible line divides the civilians in any gym: there are those trying to look better, and those trying to live longer. I’ve always been one of the first ones, the shallow ones, the ones with hope. Vanity equals hope. But now I’ve crossed the shadow-line and I’m on the other side with the sad-looking dads with their brand-new running shoes with the bright white laces and their distant memories of sex.

  And as I was realising this a young man walked up to me, all V-shaped and buff. He looked like the kind of guy who uses the sit-up machine with one leg hooked over the saddle and a honey-blonde sitting on his face.

  “Will you be long?” he asked, perfectly reasonably, but I glared at him with all the accumulated fury of my tribe.

  “Will I be long?” I snarled. “On this machine? On the planet? I’ll be as long as I damn well please, you little punk. I’ll be here until they pry my cold, dead hands from the barbells and bury me beneath a river that has been diverted to act as my tombstone. Why’m I even explaining this to a knucklehead like you? There’s only one language you people understand!”

  And I snatched up a ten-kilogram free weight and clocked him on the side of the jaw and when he went down I put my knee on his chest and wrapped his sweat towel around his head to absorb the gore and whaled on him with a kettlebell in each fist, like I was George Foreman and he was a young Ali who wasn’t ever getting off the ropes.

  “You just messed with the wrong demographic, buster!” I yelled above the screams of the ladies from the Zumba class and the applause of the other middle-aged men. “We’re confused and afraid and making a transition and we’re mad as hell and looking to punish someone for it! How’s it feel to be young right now, huh, pretty boy?”

  That didn’t happen. I just stood up, lost in my private humiliation, and watched as he did his sideways, cross-lateral sit-ups, humming a little tune to himself no doubt popular among the youth in the places where they gather.

  Then I noticed a couple that I’ve noticed before at the gym. She must be in her seventies, and her husband ten years older. He wears spotless white shoes and always a freshly laundered T-shirt neatly tucked into the elasticated waistband of his gym shorts. She wears a pink towelling tracksuit and moves from one machine to the next, doing her exercises in a thoughtful slow-mo. He stands beside her while she works out, murmuring words of encouragement. When she’s finished he helps her from the machine and takes her hand and they walk like that to the next machine, gently, like teenagers on a date, and when she’s finished for the day he carries her towel and leans on her a little as they walk together, hand in hand, out into the daylight.

  And as I watched them I felt a little less angry, and a little more grateful, and I was glad I hadn’t whaled on the young man with kettlebells after all.

  3. BARGAINING

  “Don’t forget,” my partner said, “just because a moisturiser says it’s for men, that doesn’t mean it’s anything different from one for women. It just means they’ll charge you more.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “Men won’t pay as much as women will.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re men. Men will pay more for cars but less for stuff you put on your face. Everyone knows that.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but it’s true. If it’s exactly the same product and it says it’s for men, then it’ll be cheaper.”

  “I tell you what, why don’t you look for yourself and see if it’s cheaper,” she said.

 
; “No, it probably will be more expensive,” I explained patiently, “but that’s because the stuff for men has more stuff in it.”

  “Like what?” she said. “What do you think will be in a man’s moisturiser that’s not in a woman’s moisturiser? Astronaut powder? Rugby juice?”

  “Now you’re just being argumentative,” I said. “And please don’t call it moisturiser.”

  “That’s another thing you’ll pay extra for,” she said. “All the extra effort that went into them calling it ‘dynamic hydrator’ instead of moisturiser. And they’re going to try sell you stuff you don’t need. Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

  “No thank you,” I replied with dignity. When Hemingway went shopping for skin-care products, he went the way men have gone since time immemorial: alone, with only his hunting tools and his waterproof boots and his hunter’s heart.

  “Okay,” she said, “but they can be very clever, those saleswomen.”

  “I think I can handle them,” I assured her coolly. “Salespeople are easy to handle when you’re not all emotional about it.”

  “Oh. Okay then,” she said, her face perfectly calm. “Good luck!”

  A pleasant young woman was at the counter in the department store. She smiled and I smiled. It’s a good world where men and women still smile at each other.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m looking for something that, you know, you put on your face. I know it’s probably not necessary, but, you know, may as well start before you need it, right?”

  “Mm,” she said, peering at my face. “I can see.”

  “See what?”

  “You need something for your wrinkles,” she said.

  “Wrinkles? I wouldn’t say wrinkles …”

  “Oh ja, definitely wrinkles. You need the intensive treatment.”

  “The how?”

  “You need a night cream,” she said, “and something for the morning. And do you exfoliate? I don’t think you exfoliate.”