© Julia Welstead

I’m sitting in a café suspended half way up the stairs in York Railway Station. It has Costa splattered over its windows, but is otherwise pleasantly snug and quirky, with old, much painted windows looking out over the platforms and a good choice in soul music beating like a steady heart in the background. There’s a constant flow of travellers lugging bags up the stairs and in through the door, shedding layers of rain gear (April rains) ordering up their latte’s and wiggling around cluttered tables to find themselves a corner, whilst others scrape back chairs, gather bags and brollies and squeeze their way out of the fug into bone-cold air.

My train is the 8.53am to Edinburgh, the Flying Scotsman. It’s running 20 minutes late,” two, one minutes late”, the Yorkshire lass explains over the tanoy, as if to a dim child, due to a man being struck by a train somewhere further south. She says this in the same tone in which she might blame leaves on the line, or a heavy snowfall. But my head swells at the thought – a man has been struck by a train – someone’s life has just changed dramatically, possibly irrevocably – our Yorkshire lass does not expand upon the subject. Is the man dead? It’s quite hard to imagine being struck by a train and not being killed. Perhaps a glancing blow would merely lop off a limb, but surely anything involving the torso would be catastrophic? Yet all our Yorkshire lass is doing is apologising for our 21, “two, one”, minute delay. It seems hardly right. How can I write about mid-life crisis when a man has just died?

Ah but that’s the point really isn’t it. The midlife colly wobbles is all about death. That great unspoken, taboo, reality. For many years, all through one’s youth, it has just been a distant speck on the horizon, possibly not in view at all, and then things happen to alter one’s perspective – a parent dies of old age, perhaps a friend dies of something like a heart attack, which you thought was only for old people, or your knees start to creak, your midriff expands, your hair recedes. Whatever the isolated events, the point is that they gather together and hover darkly at the periphery of your vision, like death eaters come to confront you with your own mortality.

And that’s when the panic sets in: we haven’t achieved, we haven’t done, we haven’t been, we haven’t loved, we haven’t procreated, we haven’t published, we haven’t won, and so on, and we call it midlife crisis. I think I’ve read somewhere that men tend to reach midlife crisis point earlier, in their early forties, as they realise that they may not get promoted to the giddy heights of their dreams, or they might not make their millions on that crazy idea they had (or indeed haven’t quite had), or they can’t actually get away with burning the candles at both ends now that they have wife, children, mortgage, the whole catastrophe. For women, the forties tend to be a time of great creativity, whether in child rearing, career, or both. They are usually too busy to have a crisis. For women it’s the early fifties, when perhaps the babies are leaving the nest, the hubby’s run off with someone younger/ blonder/ bustier (I’m not bitter at all, honestly) or the company has still not offered the hard-won and overly deserved promotion, when feelings of being a little lost, a bit redundant, slightly overlooked or downright worthless creep in.

 Seat 7A in Quiet Coach B. There is something undeniably pleasant about a reserved seat. This must come with middle age, because I wouldn’t have dreamt of reserving a seat way back in the days of my travelling youth. Mostly I was to be found perched on top of my rucksack in a madly swaying mid-section between carriages. This had the advantage of being next to the doors, but also gave me that nebulous, non-conformist feeling of not joining the mundane throngs within each carriage. It was all nonsense of course: in reality I was just clogging up the corridor and making it harder for everyone to get in and out at the stations. Back in the present, here I am in my smug, quiet carriage which I share with other midlifers, all with their neat luggage stowed above them, and their up-to-the-minute laptops, tablets and smart-phones set around them as barriers to conversation. Ah the peace, the grown-up-ness, the sense of achievement. I set out my stall of nifty new ASUS notebook, phone and flask of freshly juiced healthy stuff, and settle in to write. 

A happy hour flits by and I’m 600 words into my article, and in the groove. If I can get this done by the time we reach Edinburgh then the dogs and I can have the afternoon up in the hills, with that lovely feeling of having achieved one’s work goal. We slow toward a station and I pause to people-watch. A couple of folk hop in and drift to their seats. There’s some commotion at the door, various things being lifted in, and then a skinny bottle blonde rears into view, herding two chocolate-smeared tiny tots in front of her. She’s heavily made up and clad in shiny leather jacket, teensy t-shirt, drainpipe jeans and spiky sling-backs. She looks to be a haggard seventeen year old. The kids look unruly and venomous.

I’m enjoying watching the scene, smug in the certain knowledge that they can’t possibly be planning to sit in the Quiet Coach, when skinny blonde whips out a set of tickets and starts looking for seats 9A and B. These are, of course, the seats on the other side of the temple of peace that is my table. There’s a laptop man in one of them and he lowers his head a fraction, as if studying some minutiae on his screen.  Preservation instinct kicking in, I mimic him and am suddenly intensely interested in something fascinating on my laptop.

There’s a pregnant pause, and then she moves on. I dare to look up again just as another leather clad teenager appears in the aisle. The two appear to be together and it transpires, via a barely decipherable exchange between the mums, that two more babies are in existence in a pram at the doorway. Mum two – an attractive Chrissy Hynde lookalike for whom my admiration grows as the trip wears on – tells skinny blonde to just find any seats, the tickets don’t matter, and I’m right with her on that one. They settle about a third of a coach away from me, and it’s not far enough, but it could have been worse.

My writing skids to a halt as I take on the role of social anthropologist. Here’s a tasty sample of skinny blonde’s endless litany, all spoken whilst playing on her smart-phone and grabbing at crisps from a bag, and with no eye contact with her kids at any point:

[intermittent screams and general bawling from child one and two] “Stop fighting, or I’m going to punch you in the face, I don’t like violence; you’re a bully you; stop it now, you’re a nasty lad; you’ve hurt him see;  you’re a little ponce, what r u crying like a girl for; that man’s coming to tell yer off; you’ll turn into a girl; he’s a little shit; get lost I don’t love you anymore”

You get the gist. As the hideous monologue continues, she plies them with crisps, chocolate, cans of fizz, and an abandoned newspaper, this last of which they grab with glee and rip to shreds in a giddy instant.

My hitherto clear head is now befuddled and work grinds to a halt, like a train after being struck by a man. In true British fashion – and we surely cannot be proud of this trait – the occupants of the ‘Quiet Coach’ give a collective sigh and do absolutely nothing to remedy the situation. One after another, laptops lids are clicked shut and their owners resignedly stare at sheep in fields. One woman gets up and leaves, but the rest of us don’t even do that.  What is it with us lot?

I go to the loo and have a quick look into the next carriage. There’s a party of about twenty done-up-to-the-nines mutton-dressed-as-lambers having a raucous time aided by copious alcopops. An early morning hen do? An off season office party? Up the other way there’s a swaying, rheumy-eyed man repeating a monologue into his phone to anyone on his contact list who will listen, whilst gripping a can of Stella Artois between his thighs . The key phrase seems to be, ‘aye, she’ll come to her senses when she tries to get money out the account’, and from that sad mantra one can extrapolate the whole sorry tale. I return, chastened, to my seat: there’s no point moving.

Teenage Chrissy Hynde appears like an angel with colouring books and pens and the brats are momentarily hushed with awe that someone is actually trying to entertain them rather than just shout obscenities in their general direction. Within moments there are arguments over the crayons, but that tiny gap in the hullaballo gives me a slither of faith in the human condition. These kids would be OK if they were given half a chance.

I was all ready to scrap this article, as it hasn’t exactly gone to plan, but then I realised that this is where it’s at. Midlife is a place where one can’t really have the space and time for quiet contemplation. There’s work and family and travel and money worries and divorce and children and the general hubub of humanity going on all around and it’s very hard to achieve peace or karma or whatever you want to call it.

“Suicide in Stevenage, another suicide”, says the announcer later on the train, “that’s what caused our twenty-one minute delay. Apologies to passengers”.  Just another death in the hurdy gurdy of life.