I WANT to emigrate to Canada. I want a boat. I've started reading cowboy novels. I'm addicted to the television series, Smallville. Yes, good day to you all, and welcome to my mid-life crisis.
Many sufferers are assailed with thoughts that they've achieved little in life, and that time to change is running out. However, I'm far too busy to think that sort of thing. And that's just as well. If I succumbed to such sombre speculation, I fear
syringe-bearing orderlies would carry me away as I wept like a Scottish summer.
So far, I've done nothing rash or stupid. I see other middle-aged men with motorbikes or tattoos, and I pity them. When I say "pity", I'm employing the word in its original Etruscan sense: to envy.
But I don't suppose a motorbike would work for me. I do not excel at driving motor cars and fear that while, on the face of it, a bike just involves pointing yourself in the right direction and shouting "Hi-ho, Silver!", there would be intricacies to master, such as stopping.
As for the other classic sign of midlife crisis, I once put a transfer on my arm and pretended it was a tattoo. I showed it to the Burd, and she poked me in the eyelobe. Perhaps I shouldn't have prefaced the display by saying the "tattoo" was dedicated to the greatest love in my life. Hibs.
No, so far, I've done nothing rash, beyond talking about the problem in print, to tens of thousands of discerning and rational readers, and online, to millions of malevolent psychopaths. Yesterday, I read about a gambling doctor who lost his wife, home and career after suffering what a judge described as a "mid-life crisis or breakdown".
However, I've never seen the attraction of gambling. In the long run, you never win. I've never even bought a Lottery ticket, finding the 14 million-to-one odds a tad off-putting. I've three mottos in life, all wrought from bitter experience as the plaything of an evil deity. One: nothing ever works. Two (when trying to find something): nothing is ever anywhere. Three: choice of two – always wrong. I never choose correctly. It's worse than two. My key is always in the last pocket I try. If I have eight pockets, I make seven wrong choices.
It's why I believe there is a god, and that he is an evil sadist. It's my belief that he engineers matters thus. Even if I won the Lottery, he'd ensure the ticket went missing. Do not be alarmed on my behalf. I am used to it, even if on bitter days I wonder what I did in a previous life to merit such cosmic persecution.
It is for reasons like this that they will not let me into Canada. "I'm sorry, sir, but you are too unlucky, and we don't want that sort of thing to spread. Also, on the ranking of useful skills and occupational abilities, you scored one."
"Out of ten?"
"Out of 350."
As for the boat, I've got good seafaring legs, but can't be bothered with all the jargon about sails and so forth. I don't think I'd be very good at parking it either. My love of cowboy novels stems from identifying with strong loners standing against evil. I take courage from them in my ongoing battle against humanity's wickedness.
Smallville has a similar attraction. It's not the young Clark Kent I'm interested in so much as his adoptive, middle-aged father, who instils midwestern values into the teenager. Also, he runs a farm and does practical things with saws, which is what I want to do. Not the farm. Farming is mainly mucking out excrement. I'm far too busy for that sort of thing. But I'd like to be able to work a saw. With it, I would build a boat and sail to Canada, standing proudly by the mainbrace, with the wind caressing my cowboy tattoo.
America must get its finger out and fight for peaceIT'S a wee while since we turned our forensic attention towards Iran, one of the great centres of world nutterdom.
Many of you are unfamiliar with the Baltic region, and the geo-politics is admittedly difficult to follow. But it goes something like this: Iran has been accumulating the doings for nuclear power – bits of wire, some atoms, a roll of Sellotape – but says it isn't planning to build a bomb. Israel doesn't believe this and says it will engage its own blootering technology if the Iranians show signs of the hot-headedness to which they're notoriously prone, due to too much sunshine.
For some time, there was a stalemate. But now the Iranians have started firing test missiles around the Gulf of Wotsname. Understandably, the Israelis aren't happy, and the two countries are squaring up like pub brawlers saying: "Are you lookin' at ma nukes?"
The big puzzle in all this is: why don't the Americans act? Diplomats say it would be better if America just went in with all guns blazing.
But the trouble with the Americans is they're all talk and no action. They never invade anywhere and seem to have no interest in regime change, even in countries run by mad people.
Yesterday, Condoleeza Rice, the leading American wifie, said: "We are sending a message to Iran that we will defend American interests and the interests of our allies, ken?"
This is just havering. Never mind defending things. Get attacking things. And when she says "allies", she must make it clear it she's including us.
Come on, Condoleeza. In our name, get the troops in, and gie us all a bit of peace.
Life's a beach, but not for AnnTHIS column has never flinched in its admiration for Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP who fearlessly wags a finger at the modern world and its louche ways. She told Saga, the magazine for people well past their mid-life crisis: "I never go on the beach unless it is for the purpose of walking fully clothed, not lying down in a bikini." Asked whether anyone had flirted with her in the last ten years, she exclaimed: "Gracious me, no!" The woman is a saint, an ethical goddess. She's the role model that millions seek. If she were Prime Minister, house prices would not dare to fall, and citizens could stravaig the streets without fear of getting bottles smashed over their heids.
The full article contains 1102 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
