Mark Steel - Whats Going On

Ive always been suspicious of the lifestyle crisis. One of my first jokes when I began as a stand-up comic was about how a mid-life crisis was only possible if you were comfortable enough to afford one, because you couldnt imagine a peasant in Vietnam traipsing through a paddy field with a wooden plough and telling his mate, Do you know, Li Wong, I just dont know WHERE my life is heading these days.

Its clearly not a disaster, by itself, to turn forty. But that doesnt mean its altogether healthy. For a start, once youre forty everythings finite. If you average one foreign holiday a year youve probably got about thirty-five left. Its the same with books. Youve got to be selective now as theres time for only about another thousand or two. Even bananasat, say, two a week, youre down to roughly your last 3,600, so a disappointing banana now carries a poignancy that didnt apply at nineteen.

Also, and I dont think this is being paranoid, the older you get the nearer you are to dying. I noticed that whenever I saw the obituary page in a newspaper, Id automatically look at the deceaseds date of birth first. If it was some old geologist born in 1919, that would be quite comforting. But anything later than 1950 would be disconcerting, so then Id check what theyd died of, and maybe gasp, Oh thank Christ for that, he was a junkie. That doesnt apply to me then.

And then you have to put up with other 40-year-olds proclaiming they LOVE being this age. The worst are those who pretend theyre still as youthful as ever by saying, Martin and I certainly arent over the hill. You should have seen us last month, jigging in the aisles to Fleetwood Mac at the Birmingham Exhibition Centre.

Its harder if you are still in touch with current youth culture, because then you realise how old you seem. For example, I love much of the British hip-hop known as grime, but was wary of going to a live gig. Then I went to see Lady Sovereign and realised why. I was surrounded by tongue-studded 17-year-olds taking pictures of each other with their mobiles, and felt they were all thinking, That bloke must be a) from the record company, b) the drug squad, c) about to run through the crowd and grab his daughter shouting So THIS is where you come when you say youre round Sarahs studying, or d) on a register having recently been exposed in the Sun .

On top of these problems I had an extra one specially designed for someone in my time and place. I grew up confident that I would be part of the generation that would change the world so that people would matter more than profits. Such was my success that, around the time I reached forty, it seemed to be universally accepted as a factas undeniable as gravity or Napoleons defeat at Waterloothat nothing can be built or made or done properly without someone making a huge profit. And in Britain as much as anywhere the government appears to believe theres a scientific law, perhaps first stated by Isaac Newton, that states: If a substance shall not have Balfour Beatty involved in it, then that substance will surely melt.

Libraries, prisons, schools, sports projects, transport, everything depends on attracting business. Now, if you suggest to most people in authority that something could be made without businessmen making money from it, you feel like an eccentric Victorian telling his friends over a brandy that youve invented a flying machine. They look at you as if to say, My God, sir, I contend your scheme is PREPOSTEROUS.

Any route through a school, even a primary school, takes you past adverts for Sainsburys and posters proclaiming that the computers were generously provided by Tesco. Maybe next the lessons will be pay-per-learn, so the first five minutes are free but after that you have to pay a pound or the teacher goes all fuzzy. Or theyll be sponsored, so science teachers will announce flatly, In this experiment, were, um, going to try to see, ahem, how much of this green, er, green liquid, is displaced by this object here. And the liquid were using is, er, Lilt, with the totally tropical taste that puts the fizz back into physics. Its tangy, its cheery, it proves quantum theory.

Then theres the unfathomable railway companies, that most people consistently state have become worse since the unreliable days of British Rail. Maybe the chaos of the transport system could be utilised for the Olympics with the introduction of a special London triathlon in which you have to get a bus to Brixton, an underground to London Bridge and a Connex South Central back to East Croydondo that in less than five hours and you deserve a gold fucking medal.

The fear with the Olympics is that as of now we already seem to be four years behind, although its only three years since we were told we were holding them. I have a dread that when the time comes, the athletics track will still be rubble and the swimming pool will be half-built with no water in it, so the swimmers will be told to run backwards and forwards along the bottom.

Whenever a leading politician makes a comment about anything cultural, its along the lines of Tony Blairs assessment of British music: a valuable and integral part of our trade across the world. Or the minister of culture extolling an award-winning British film by saying, This shows the importance of the film industry as a source of foreign earnings. The idea that anyone might paint or write or sing for a purpose other than boosting their share price seems beyond their comprehension. If Blair was asked what he thought of the Mona Lisa , hed probably say, It should be applauded as one of the leading exporters of smiles throughout Europe.

Even the traditionally rebellious environment of the rock festival fizzes with sponsorship, from Orange tents and Nokia fields. At the Reading festival, noted for its love of thrash heavy metal, they have the Carling stage, so bands such as Slayer scream and roar about kicking arse and cocksuckers, under a 50-yard-wide banner for the most famously weedy lager in existence.