Mike Carter - Uneasy Rider: Travels Through a Mid-Life Crisis

Contents

For Norma

To my editor Andrew Goodfellow, for approaching me in the first place and for having blind faith. To Simon Shore, for your patience, insight and encouragement and for the Borough Market Scotch eggs. I owe you much. To Joanne OConnor, who commissioned the original weekly column in the Observer and actually ran it, as opposed to just pretending to and not telling me until I got back. To Carole Cadwalladr, for refusing to let me back out. To Isabel Tamarit, for giving me a quiet place to work when I needed it most. To Wendy, Gordon and Paul your capacity for love and support never ceases to amaze me. To all the bikers I met on my trip. You really are the nicest bunch of people in the world. To the Aussie Honeymooners, for restoring my faith in coupledom. To Kevin and the gang at BMWs rider training centre in Wales for all your help. To Mrs Chrysanthi, for Ilias and for taking me in. Rest in peace. And finally, to Pete. I hope we are at last getting to know one another.

The nadir of a mans life is 42. I dont know why, exactly. The frustrating thing about a nadir is that you cannot know precisely when you have reached it. That only comes later.

There are plenty of surveys that confirm it to be true, though. You can find them if youre looking for them. I was coming across them everywhere: magazines in doctors waiting rooms, newspapers discarded on trains, television, radio; all concluding that the absolute rock bottom, the pit of despair, the precise moment when a man runs out of steam, suffers a catastrophic crisis of confidence, hits ground zero, call it what you will, occurs at age 42.

Its amazing when I started looking more personally how much misery I found attached to men and the number 42. It was the age my dad walked away from my mum and his family. A teetotal uncle started drinking heavily in his 42nd year. A good friend had a heart attack aged 42. An acquaintance shot himself at, yes, 42. Elvis. He was 42. Nearly all my male fortysomething friends and colleagues appeared to be going up the wall, tearing out what was left of their hair. None of them seemed particularly happy. Most reported a slow, creeping sense of futility to their lives.

From my completely unscientific analysis, it seemed to me that men might reach some kind of crossroads at aged 42. There were no signposts at this junction, no clues as to where to go, just a terrible restlessness and a desire to be somewhere else. One night men go to bed and all is well with the world. Then they wake up and everything has gone to shit.

In April 2006, I turned 42.

19,950: miles ridden. I was tempted to make a final circuit of the M25 to hit 20,000. But the lure of my bed won through.

: gifts received, including a frying pan, a map, and a piece of old rope (but excluding the pens and the man-size boxes of tissues).

: number of ferries taken.

: number of tyres worn out.

: puncture, in Spain.

: fall off the bike, in Estonia.

: number of countries visited.

: number of countries where I was informed at some stage that the next country was dangerous.

: attacks three by dogs, one each by a snake, a wasp, a goose and a human.

Millions: wasps splattered against my windshield. You could call that a victory.

: email addresses/phone numbers exchanged, with the words if youre in London, come and stay.

: euros paid in fines, including 50 euros to the scooter-riding cop in Barcelona suffering from small-bike syndrome.

: dead polish sheep used as a saddle cover. It didnt have to be Polish, but it did, ideally, have to be dead.

3,000: euros spent on fuel. The most expensive fill-ups were in Turkey.

: number of times I lost all my underwear.

: sets of earplugs lost.

: women I met I could easily have fallen for.

: number of people who definitely fell for me. His name was Hassan, a waiter in Turkey.

THE MORNING AFTER the Observer newspaper Christmas party seemed different from previous years. Lying in bed, head throbbing, I replayed sequentially the evenings events, frame by frame, waiting for the frame that would bring the replay grinding to a halt; the frame that would have to be analysed closely, stared at in horror.

Twelve months earlier, the frozen frame had involved me calling a Cabinet minister a name that Dennis Skinner would have baulked at; a frame that contained, apart from me and the minister, obviously, a dozen of my colleagues doing a good impersonation of Munchs The Scream.

And then there was the do a few years back, when my colleagues were invited to present their party pieces, and we had recitations of Kipling and polished light opera pieces and, if I recall correctly, a rather good mime. And then we had the bloke who hadnt prepared anything but who didnt want to miss out, who blew a condom up on his head while attempting to juggle three limes. This had failed to capture the audiences imagination quite as much as the Gilbert and Sullivan.

But each frame flickered by and the people were laughing with me, and nobody stormed off in a huff, nor did I try to shag a work-experience girl, nor throw up, nor attempt to dance. I appeared not to have told anybody about fictitious awards or trophies Id never won nor, indeed, pull a prophylactic over my head and reach for the bar fruit.

There was a scuffle, a few hands straying over backsides inappropriately, animated returnees from the toilet with the sniffles. But, glory be to God, I was never in those scenes. Maybe I was becoming the sophisticate I always suspected I might be.

There was a section missing between midnight and the taxi ride home, of course, but no alarm bells were ringing. I could walk into work safe in the knowledge that, if there was somebody at the party whod set the bar for idiocy, a giant sozzled prat against whose antics we could all offset our own misdemeanours, for once it wasnt going to be me.

So later that day, in the office, when my editor walked up to me and asked when I would be leaving, accompanied by a little twist of the right wrist, those hitherto silent bells started to tinkle like windchimes on a gentle breeze.

When another male colleague approached, eyes like saucers, shook my hand and slapped my back in the wildly heterosexual manner of a beer commercial, I had a full Westminster-Abbey-after-a-coronation going on. The motoring editor was next to present himself. Sensational stuff, he said, also twisting his right wrist. Dangerous, sure, but what a trip! I only wish I could come with you.

But where exactly was I going? I urgently needed to sit down and probe once more the Stella-fuelled fog swirling round, crawl back through that tape. Oh, God. What had I said? What had I done?

Young people of an idealistic nature are generally attracted to a career in newspapers by the spirit of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. What they find are Lord Copper and William Boot. Rumour and drunken misunderstandings are as likely to shape the papers content as a leak from the Treasury or the outbreak of war in some distant former colony. When an editor has an idea they think is worthwhile, or is presented with such an idea at morning conference, say, from where my colleagues had just emerged, it becomes utterly inviolable. As I searched for some Nurofen, the word Ishmaelia bounced around my addled brain.

I didnt have to wait too long to find out what was going on. Apparently, in that drink-fuelled witching hour, where everything is possible and the world is just one big casserole of love and opportunity, I had announced that in a few months time I was going to take a motorcycle on a six-month road trip. (And not just any old motorcycle, but a big one, specifically a BMW R1200GS. This had required zero imagination on my part: I had just read