It was uncanny, discomfiting, even a little bit alarming. He seemed to be reading my mind, as if my thoughts were being hurled back at me through the ether. Why are we so tired? Why does it feel as though time itself is speeding up, making midlife so much more nerve-wracking an experience than it might otherwise be? Why do you never hear a middle-aged person talking about being bored? Toby Longworth was reading from Marcus Berkmann’s new book, A Shed of One’s Own: Midlife Without the Crisis, for Book of the Week on Radio 4 on Monday morning.
A man, according to Berkmann, who usually writes about music and for this magazine, must have a shed. It’s the only way to deal with the gradual onset of middle age, when if you’re really honest all you want to do is nothing at all. You don’t need a garden for this shed, or have aspirations to grow tomatoes, tobacco, the despised cucumber. Your shed can be ‘virtual’, a room, an office, a shed in the mind, but it must allow its occupant that most precious thing — the appearance of thinking about something when actually you’re not thinking about anything at all. For the shed is where you indulge in ‘directed idleness’, and rediscover those ‘small purposes’ of which true pleasure is made.
Not much attention was paid by Berkmann to what the other half of the human race is supposed to do while said males are ensconced in their sheds. Who’s going to shop for dinner? Put out the rubbish? Drive Timothy to tae kwon do? But I can almost forgive Berkmann for this failure of nerve. He was just so spot-on about that strange moment in midlife when you suddenly find yourself no longer able to connect with the younger model that was you in your twenties, when ambition, purpose, direction were all ahead of you, not behind you.
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