should all be allowed to kiss the face of God, whether it comes in the form of a bigger bike or a younger lover or the rolling sea. How else to respond to our mortality?
There is no cure for death, no age limit for dreams, and no escape from who we are and always will be-mortal, fallible creatures, full of love and longing.
And if the young lover breaks your heart, or if you fall off your Harley, or if Buenos Aires is a disappointment-if you make a fool of yourself-well, that is what we do, and what we have always done.
That is not a mid-life crisis.
It’s just the latest in a long line of cock-ups.
Sooner or later you will find yourself in a situation. It may not happen for ten years. It could be tonight. But it is coming-be sure of that – and when it arrives you will have the choice between the only two buttons that really matter on your biological dashboard.
Fight or flight?
You might be in a bar. You might be in a restaurant. It could be at the end of your road or it could be on a tropical island. You might be standing outside your home. The location doesn’t matter. This is how it will be: you will be confronted by in-appropriate behaviour that intrudes upon those you love. Effing and blinding and talk of a graphically sexual nature. You know the kind of thing. And, in an instant, you will have to decide – Do I say something?
Or do I say nothing?
This is the terrible thing. This is the heart of the matter. You will not be alone. You will be in company – with your girlfriend or wife, or with your children, even if they have yet to be born-people who look to you to protect them from the worst of this world.
And there will be a cackling mob of pimply cavemen, every other gormless word an expletive, talking about bitches and blow-jobs and easy birds. They will bring their world into your world and you will have to decide, in a terrifying instant, what to do.
Even if what you do is nothing.
You can get killed for saying something. Even a mild rebuke can get you the death sentence, effective immediately. Men die for speaking up.
But these lads are loud – too loud to be ignored. By you or your woman or your child. Do you want your kid to listen to this stuff? Or do you risk making him or her an orphan?
Yobs are so touchy these days, that’s the problem. Yobs are more sensitive than they have ever been in yob history. They react to the mildest rebuke with murderous rage. The average hoodie is thin-skinned beyond belief, his self-esteem so fragile that any criticism is almost guaranteed to explode into physical confrontation.
One thing is certain: reasoning with them does not work. Appealing to their better nature is a waste of time – they don’t have one. If, when yobs swear, you tell them to turn down the volume, you’d better be prepared to go all the way.
Because they will be.
Context is everything. I don’t advocate going around telling every foul-mouthed moron to shut his filthy cakehole. It does not bother me at all if I am at a football match and the bloke in the seat behind me is shouting about ‘stupid cunts’. The stupid cunts at football matches don’t bother me. I don’t much care what anyone says if I am alone. But if I am out with my family and it happens – in a restaurant, in a park, in a hotel bar-then that’s different.
Nothing will get me to keep my mouth shut. And it is nothing to do with bravery. I just can’t accept foul-mouthed strangers entering my daughter’s world. And I am very happy to kick, gouge and claw while rolling in the dirt to make my point.
Stupid, really. I am not much good to my daughter if some psycho–chav buries his blade in my heart. And what a waste – to lose your life because you asked some pathetic piece of pond scum-and his mates, because they are invariably mob-hande – to watch his potty mouth.
But there is nothing rational about the flight-or-fight mechanism. It is not a debating society. It is not as though you carefully weigh the options and then go with one or the other. The moment you make your decision is here and gone before you know it.
And suddenly you are either bowing your craven head because safety is the wisest course of action, or you are confronting a group of leering teenagers-because sometimes the stupid thing is also the right thing.
And then you ask yourself: Can I take them? These leering strangers – will they put me in the A&E or the graveyard?
Almost certainly, all things considered, you can’t take them. They are younger than you, stronger than you, and you are the one who is flying solo. They are what the media call multiple assailants.
But what gets you through is that – if you are mad enough to say something in the first place-you are inevitably a lot angrier than they are.
You come out of nowhere, seething with rage, right in their faces – they haven’t been trying to offend your small child. You’re ready to rumble, full of that righteous, blood-pumping juice where you just don’t care what happens to you. And that might just be enough to make them back down and go away, despite their superior numbers.
If they don’t kill you, that is.
They killed young Kevin Johnson. He was twenty-two years old, at home in Sunderland with his seven-month-old baby son Chase trying to sleep in his cot. It was the early hours of the morning. And down on the street, right outside Kevin’s front door, a gang of lads was getting very loud. Kevin could have put the pillow over his head. He could have tried to soothe his son. He could have done nothing. That would have been the easiest thing to do. But Kevin went out into the street and told the gang-there were three of them-to keep the noise down. And they stabbed him to death. And Chase Johnson will grow up without a father because Kevin refused to take the soft, sensible option. Because Kevin Johnson was decent. Because Kevin Johnson was brave. Because Kevin Johnson wanted to protect his family. No doubt Chase will be proud of his father one day. And so he should be. Even if he will never remember him.
Entitlement – that’s the great curse of our age. Every scabby little yob thinks he has the right to do whatever he wants at whatever volume he wants. Nobody has any responsibility to the wider community. And that’s what it comes down to when you tell some foul-mouthed gang to cut it out. You are saying: I’m here too, I have rights too. A crazy thing to say in this day and age.
In Brokeback Mountain, Heath Ledger’s character Ennis is at a Fourth of July party with his wife and two small daughters when a couple of bikers start making a loud comparative study of ‘pussy’ in Montana and Wyoming.
‘Let’s move, Ennis, let’s just move,’ says his wife, Alma. But Ennis is a man not a mouse and he quietly and politely asks the two drunken bikers to ‘Keep it down – I got two little girls here.’
They don’t just ignore him. They start loudly speculating about the last time Ennis had sex with his missus. They provoke him. They goad him. They are unrepentant in their obscenities. They can’t get past the pussy. It’s pussy, pussy, pussy with these guys. And they tell him to listen to his wife: if he doesn’t like it, then go sit somewhere else.
Ennis goes wild. He kicks the first biker full in the face, knocking him out cold, and offers to put the other one’s teeth in his digestive system. The conscious biker backs away, dragging his bloodied pal with him.
And what makes the scene a work of genius is that Ennis’ wife and children are not grateful. Far from it.
They are all appalled at the violence that lurks inside this soft-spoken husband and devoted father. As several families pick up their blankets and move away – as if it is Ennis who poses a threat to civilisation, rather than the bikers – his children whimper and hide and his wife stares at him as if seeing him for the first time.
In my experience, that’s just what it is like.