Amid all the recent commentary about John Cleese resurrecting Fawlty Towers, one fact struck me as even more preposterous than the setting’s proposed relocation to a Caribbean boutique hotel: when the original series aired, Cleese was only 35 years old.
When it comes to screen culture, middle age isn’t what it used to be. People magazine gleefully reported last year that the characters in And Just Like That, the rebooted series of Sex and the City, were the same age (average 55) as the Golden Girls when they made their first outing in the mid-80s. How can that be possible? My recollection of the besequined Florida housemates was that they were teetering off this mortal coil, but then everyone seems old when you are young.
Meanwhile, a popular Twitter account, The Meldrew Point, has the sole purpose of celebrating people who, implausibly, have reached the age the actor Richard Wilson was when he appeared in the first episode of One Foot in the Grave (19,537 days). It’s hard to believe, but these 53-and-a-half-year-olds include J-Lo, Renée Zellweger, Molly Ringwald, Julia Sawalha and Ice Cube.
Back in the day, 40 was the marker for midlife, but now, finding consensus on when middle age begins and what it represents isn’t easy. The Collins English dictionary gnomically defines it as “the period in your life when you are no longer young but have not yet become old”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says it is between 40 and 60. Meanwhile, a 2018 YouGov survey reported that most Britons aged between 40 and 64 considered themselves middle-aged – but so did 44% of people aged between 65 and 69.
“There’s no point trying to impose chronological age on what is or is not middle age,” says Prof Les Mayhew, the head of global research at the International Longevity Centre UK. “With people living longer, your 30s are no longer middle age; that has switched to the 40s and 50s.” But even then, he believes putting a number on it is meaningless. “In some cases, in your 50s, you might be thinking about a second or even third career, but for others you might have serious health problems and be unable to work.
“Governments are always trying to impose these labels of administrative convenience for things that are supposed to happen at a certain age – for example, you are allegedly an adult at the age of 18 and you aren’t old enough to receive a state pension until 66. Totally arbitrary. Meanwhile, GPs want you to book in for a ‘midlife MOT’, which is a great jazzy concept to get out of what should be happening – an annual health check-up.”
Patrick Reid, 53, is a London-based financial trader who has an unusual perspective on age. “I went to university late; I was 23 and other students used to say to me: ‘Oh, you’re so old!’ Then, after working for 15 years as a programme scheduler on BBC Two, I decided to change career. I turned up for my first day on a futures trading desk in my best suit with a Guardian under my arm. The place was full of these 21-year-olds in jeans going: ‘Who the hell is this?’
“Then, eight years ago, I went through another change. I’d been a bit of a party animal; it wasn’t agreeing with me. I decided to take steps to get happier and fitter. I feel so lucky now that I can go to the gym, run my own business and have a holistic outlook on life. Age has no meaning to me, except sometimes I do look in the mirror and say: ‘Oh yeah, I am actually 53.’”
Middle age once had a purpose of sorts, a time that offered the stability and continuity that used to come from having a job for life. Now, it’s not just your employment that might feel precarious, but your job function itself. Research from the Institute for the Future reported that 85% of jobs that will exist by 2030 don’t exist yet.
“This used to be a stage where you slowed down to enjoy life. It allowed a person to take stock and reassess,” says Julia Bueno, a therapist and the author of Everyone’s a Critic. “Now, it’s: ‘Retrain to be a psychotherapist!’ I think middle age reflects that you’ve still got life in you; you’re embracing a last hurrah. But I’m also aware that some people feel pressurised to reinvent themselves, to look fantastic, to not slow down or age gracefully. There’s the pressure to put retinol on your face, or erase or glam the greys. You’re not allowed to just be grey – it has to be glamorous.”
Bueno works with many women who have become mothers in their 40s, even 50s, and considers this another important shift. “Having a newborn in your arms does throw hackneyed ideas about middle age out of the window.”
The very words “middle age” can cause strong negative reactions. Roz Colthart, 49, runs a property business in Edinburgh alongside studying for a master’s degree. “Middle age as a term makes you feel a bit yuck. The term ‘middle’ is so vanilla; who wants to be average? You’re no longer young, but you’re not an old sweetie that people are going to give up their seat for on the bus, either. Yet middle age is actually a fantastic place to be. It’s just the judgmental attitudes towards it that are depressing.”
Colthart does not tick many of middle age’s traditional boxes. “I don’t have a husband; I don’t have children. There is a pressure on people that we have to conform with the life cycle according to what age we are.”
It’s true that, in the past, midlife was associated with a particular set of life circumstances – a mortgage, a spouse, children, a lawnmower. But for many, these life stages are happening later, if at all. It must be harder to feel like you are in the pipe-and-slippers phase of life when, at 40, you still live in a flatshare and don’t own a sofa, let alone a home.
Dalia Hawley, 41, lives in Wakefield and is what marketers would term a “geriatric millennial”. She lives with her partner and their three chickens and runs a skincare business part-time. “I might be classed as middle-aged to some people, but I don’t feel it. Part of me does sometimes feel as if I should own a house or have a full-time job, but then I think I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I’ve never earned enough to get a mortgage. When I was in my 20s, I thought 40 was really old. But now I’m there, I feel younger and fitter than I’ve ever been.”
So what age does she consider to be old? “I’m not sure there is such an age. It’s more a question of whether someone can live independently. For example, both my parents are in their late 70s and still go travelling in their caravan. I don’t think of them as being old at all.”
The crime writer Casey Kelleher, 43, is another midlife millennial. She is equally scathing about the idea of being middle-aged: “I feel as if I’m only now starting my life. My first son was born when I was 17 and my second at 20. I met my husband a couple of years later. The kids have left home and now we are reassessing our lives.” While most of her friends are setting down with young families, she is contemplating travelling, moving abroad or working with foster children.
“Midlife isn’t a plateau,” she says. “I don’t like the phrase ‘over the hill’, as if the best times are behind you. Considering how long we might live, it’s worth savouring every single day.”
Kelleher finds that writing older characters is exciting. “The stakes are much higher in midlife. By then, people have richer life experiences, lifelong friendships, real love, loss, pain and heartbreak. Characters have more to lose if things go wrong. The way that characters, particularly female ones, between 40 and 60 are depicted by my generation of crime writers and on TV has started to change. Just look at Happy Valley.”
The stories we tell about being a particular age are powerful because they reflect what is expected of us, what possibilities might await. Sharon Blackie, a psychologist and the author of Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life, says that in recent years, for women, at least, the cultural discussion has shifted so that menopause has eclipsed middle age as a significant transition. “The interesting thing is that menopause can happen at all different ages – mid-40s, mid-50s and beyond – rather than one age.” Certainly, high-profile documentaries such as Channel 4’s documentary Sex, Myths and the Menopause, and online communities such as Noon, have changed the conversation.
Blackie observes that, in folklore, the hag, while appearing to be the epitome of people’s fears about ageing, is actually a positive archetype. “The hag is a woman, from menopause onwards, who is not defined by their relationship to anyone else. They are not someone’s mother or daughter or wife; they have their own power, their own way of being in the world. There is a freedom to not belonging to anyone that allows them to come to fruition in the world.”
It’s a comforting theory, but I am not sure the world has caught up with it yet. You need only witness the wave of vitriol directed at Madonna’s smooth-cheeked appearance at the Grammys to realise that there is still widespread fear about how women choose to tackle the ageing process.
And what of men? In the past, the male midlife crisis had a well-trodden set of cliches, from the red Ferrari or Harley-Davidson to the trophy wife. Are these still relevant? These days, the term seems to be associated more with anxiety, depression and the search for meaning than with the quest for leather trousers. I even came across an academic paper entitled Dark Night of the Shed: Men, the Midlife Crisis, Spirituality – and Sheds.
“Although men don’t experience the same cataclysmic physical change as women in midlife, many of the men I speak to do go through a significant psychological change around the age of 50, which can be accompanied by a similar sense of grief and loss that women go through with menopause,” says Blackie. “Carl Jung theorised that the first half of life was about working in the outer world, developing your identity, career and family. He viewed the second half of life as being about turning inward, searching for meaning, spiritual or otherwise.”
For many men, a less esoteric way of addressing existential angst is to embrace a punishing fitness regime. Yet, while this is generally a healthy thing, the body doesn’t lie. Devoted tennis player Geoff Dyer, the 64-year-old author of The Last Days of Roger Federer, a meditation on late middle age, recently had elbow surgery. “Three months after the operation, by which time I was supposed to be able to play tennis again, I saw the surgeon and told him it hadn’t worked. I’d gone from being a coolish middle-aged person with an elbow problem to an old and frail invalid.
“He showed me the MRI, which proved it had worked, and said to keep at it, keep doing the physical therapy. And he was right. I’m now restored to full fitness. It might not seem like that to you if you saw me hobbling around the court, but I am in a state of youthful-seeming bliss.”
Dyer is similarly exasperated that he cannot drink much any more. “Boozing takes a fearsome toll as you get older. I say that with some authority, because we had a dinner at home in LA on Saturday where I had a skinful of delicious red wine – by London standards, a modest amount – and felt like 100-year-old sludge for 24 hours afterwards.”
And therein lies the problem with all our “age is just a number” mental gymnastics. Dispensing with middle age is comforting because if we never face up to being in the middle, we will never have to contemplate the end. Until we are forced to, that is.
A good friend of mine turned 60 recently; he summed up the experience as “a sudden cold-water splash of finding yourself facing terms like ‘geriatric’ and ‘senior’ and feeling utterly disconnected from any real sense of what your biological age means, other than the onset of physical decrepitude and declining eyesight”. The rude awakening was largely caused, he said, because “when we get to our 50s, we kid ourselves that it’s just a last gasp of the early 40s, when it isn’t at all”.
Researching this article, I was struck by the fact that not a single person I spoke to was happy to own the badge of middle age. But back in the day, the term was viewed as a state rather than a trait. A person was middle-aged because that was their actual stage of life, not simply labelled as such because they were uncreative, tedious or, heaven forfend, unproductive. As someone who went back to university at 56 and is planning to launch a business, I am as guilty of a failure to relax as everyone else. Are we all just frantically trying to stave off the inevitable?
Bueno recalls being at a 50th birthday party at a pub with funky music. “People were having a great time. We were all bending ourselves out of shape, leaning in to talk to one another.” You might think they were discussing important ideas and plans for the future, but you would be wrong. “Everyone was shouting the same sentence: ‘I can’t hear a bloody thing!’”
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
