Fit, Fifty and Fired Up

Fit, Fifty and Fired Up

One man’s witty and inspiring account
of taking a risk to chase a more joyful life

Nigel Marsh

First published in 2012

Copyright © Nigel Marsh 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Arena Books, an imprint of
Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone:   (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax:       (61 2) 9906 2218
Email:    info@allenandunwin.com
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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74237 918 0

Internal design by Darian Causby
Map by Guy Holt
Set in 12.5/17.6 pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my darling Mum

‘Your time is limited,
so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.’

Steve Jobs

Contents

Introduction

1 Fit, Fifty and Fabulous?

2 Spot the Difference

3 Six Fish

4 Me and Steve Martin

5 The Hamster Wheel

6 Tin Dinner

7 Dial H for Liz

8 The Long Goodbye

9 Porker

10 Middle-Class Madness

11 The Power of None

12 Fuck Off, Lance Armstrong

13 Pick a Number

14 Shuford2000

15 Holland versus Germany

16 Hits the Spot

17 Wedding Cake Island

18 The Magnificent Seven

19 Abbeyview

20 From Obelisk to Cobblers

21 The Letter

22 Yvonne Fletcher

23 Lampshade

24 Pretty Woman

25 The Wild Rover

26 North Head

27 It’s All About Me

28 Speed Limits

29 Washing-Up Liquid and Firm Tofu

30 Twenty-eight Red Roses

31 Running to Fat

32 Who Put the Kiwi in the Lemon?

33 Are We There Yet?

34 The 40-Day Plan

35 Bourgbarre

36 Phone Lottery

37 The Undertakers

38 Rich Fuckers

39 Katy Perry

40 Count Ketchup

41 Slow Down, You’re Here

42 George Clooney

43 Twelve Months, Twelve Lessons

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

I’ll never forget my first day at work in Australia.

To be fair it’s not difficult to remember the date as it was the eleventh of September 2001, or 9/11 as the Americans call it. My wife and I had moved ourselves and our four young children to Australia from the UK four days earlier, and on the morning in question I was so busy getting ready for my job that I hadn’t watched or listened to the news.

I was a bit surprised when I turned up at my office. While I hadn’t been expecting a brass band or lines of bunting to greet me, I had thought I might at least be met at reception and shown to my desk. Instead, my new colleagues were huddled around TV and computer screens and no one so much as glanced at me. Understandable if you knew they were watching the twin towers collapse in lower Manhattan, but confusing behaviour if you weren’t aware of what had just happened in the US.

That was ten years ago. More recently, Kate, my wife of twenty years, set off for her first day at work in Australia. She too walked into an office to find everyone huddled around TV and computer screens. Turns out news of Osama bin Laden’s death was breaking.

It makes me reflect on all we’ve experienced as a family in between those two cataclysmic dates in modern history.

I often say that people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten. The last decade has certainly proved that true in my life. I started out my time in Australia with a crusading new-country-new-start-new-improved-Nigel passion. I wanted to get healthy, cut down on my drinking and try to limit the excessive spillover of work into family time. Basically, to be more comfortable in my own skin, have better balance and be happier with my contribution to the world. After a year I realised that I’d still hardly scratched the surface. Yet ten years on it would be no exaggeration to say I’m an entirely different person to the one I was then. In no way perfect, but definitely different. So I’m left to wonder: what will my life be like ten years from now?

More to the point, what will your life be like in ten years? Take a moment to think about it. Could you be postponing joy and happiness by waiting for the right opportunity to come along – the one that finally allows you to be the real you?

I remember reading an observation by the author Jane Shilling: ‘Turns out that what I did while I was waiting for my real life to begin was my life.’ It was a lesson I took to heart. As I’ve got older I’ve become increasingly convinced not only that we shouldn’t wait to see how life pans out, but that it’s incumbent on us to take personal responsibility for the type of life we’d like to lead – because not choosing is a choice. To put it another way, we shouldn’t leave it up to others to decide how we’ll spend our one brief period of existence on this planet. Whether we like it or not, we are the people we decide to be. But how do we decide who we want to be? And when we’ve decided, how do we go about realising that vision? And if we do succeed in creating a life we’re proud of, how do we sustain it? As Anton Chekhov noted, ‘Any fool can face a crisis, it’s day-to-day living that’s the real challenge.’

Reflecting on the question of how I can make the second half of my life worthwhile and fulfilling has led me to pick up my pen again ten years after the events I recounted in Fat, Forty and Fired. As the title suggests that book describes the year I lost my job at the age of forty. It was a momentous twelve months, during which I turned the telescope around and tried to put the things that were important to me at the centre of my life as opposed to letting them languish at the edges.

Fit, Fifty and Fired Up isn’t as neat as Fat, Forty and Fired. Life rarely is. It’s not the story of a life-changing year ‘off’. This time around, I’m writing about a period where I am mostly in work – of one form or another. Rather than having a perfect narrative arc, Fit, Fifty and Fired Up is a more messy collection of reflections from my continuing struggle to juggle work, family and life a decade later. I’m not claiming to have the answers for anyone else – or that my story is particularly dramatic. There are hundreds of books in the shops recording the achievements of remarkable people – this is not one of them. No, what follows is simply the story of how I feel as, with some uncertainty, I face my fifties.

1

Fit, Fifty and Fabulous?

I should start with a confession. When I began writing this book I was not yet fifty. Nor was I particularly fit. I was actually somewhat chubby. But the thing was, having started my fifth decade fat, forty and fired, I dreamed of ending it fit, fifty and fabulous.

Easier said than done. I could see the potential for my life to become a series of disappointments and compromises. So when a friend of mine quoted his personal trainer as saying, ‘At fifty, you are the person you will be for the rest of your life’, it was a very sobering thought for me. I decided that if I wanted to have some control over what my old age would be like, I needed to take action straight away – before it was too late.

So much for resolutions. Still, I might have left things to amble along if not for a visit to my father while on a trip to the UK. Dad had been living in a nursing home for the last six years. Since Dad suffered from both Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia, visiting him was not exactly a laugh riot. It’d been a couple of years since he’d been able to communicate.

Certificates from his distinguished career in the navy lined the walls of his room. I hope they provided Dad with a glimmer of recognition or pleasure in his rare moments of mental clarity; they only served to remind me of the cruel contrast between his past and present situations. But it was the pictures around the room, not the certificates, that reduced me to helpless tears. They showed Dad in happier times, when he was still vibrant, charismatic and healthy. There were pictures of him smiling and handsome, hugging my kids, at a dinner table with Mum, in his naval uniform, with my brother’s family, overseas on holidays, larking around wearing a silly hat on a beach with my brother and me. Each of these photos represented a special and unique memory, and had been put there to remind Dad of how loved he was and what a wonderful life he’d lived. They were like a knife to my heart.

By late 2009 his health had grown steadily and distressingly worse. I asked Kate to keep the kids back for a while so I could visit Dad by myself first. Talking to someone who can’t respond, who gives no sign that he even knows you’re there, is hard enough for an adult let alone a child, so I tended to visit Dad alone or limit the time the kids spent with him.

It turned out to be a wise decision because I took one look at Dad and promptly burst into tears. Great – barely two minutes in and I was already blubbing like a baby.

Dad, Jonathon and me, Mothecombe Beach, Devon, 1966

After composing myself I spent half an hour telling Dad about the family, how everyone was fine and how much we loved him. As usual, Dad showed not a flicker of recognition.

I was so upset after we left Dad that I asked Kate to take the kids to lunch so I could go for a walk by myself. While wandering around the cold wintry streets, I couldn’t help thinking that no matter how clever or special we might think we are, we’re all headed for the same place. Life really is short and most definitely not a dress rehearsal. It’s so easy to meander through life and only realise too late that you’ve wasted the chance to spend time on the important things.

As I rejoined Kate and the kids I knew something had changed in me. If it was true that at fifty you were the person you’d be for the rest of your life, I couldn’t just go back home and carry on as normal. I would have to make some changes.

2

Spot the Difference

There was little time to act on my reflections when we got back to Australia, with the family returning almost immediately to our normal, busy – and strangely loud – routine.

As is the case for many working fathers with school-age kids (at this point Alex was fifteen, Harry was twelve and both Grace and Eve were ten), my family life often felt like one long noisy blur. At work I was used to being in control; at home it was thinly disguised chaos.

Ten years of getting our four kids to school on time, properly dressed and prepared, had sent me prematurely grey. It never ceased to amaze and irritate me that when I gave them orders, rather than simply obeying me, they debated them. (I suppose I should have recognised the warning signs that were evident from an early age. The first time I enthusiastically threw Harry a ball and said, ‘Catch!’, he responded, ‘Why?’)

And the chaos wasn’t limited to weekdays. If anything, the weekends were worse. How this could be possible given neither Kate nor I had any work commitments on Saturday and Sunday was beyond me, but the endless round of sport, birthday parties and the like frequently brought the pressure to boiling point.

About the only oasis of calm amid the frantic activity during a typical week in our family came on Sunday evening with our regular weekly walk to the Indian takeaway to pick up dinner. This was one of my favourite times with the kids. We took the dog and just messed around and nattered as we strolled up the hill.

Next to the curry house was a video shop and a corner store, so the kids invariably ended up convincing me to rent them a movie and then buy ice cream or chocolate to round out the movie-going experience.

One of my secret guilty pleasures of these outings was to flip through the stack of gossip magazines on the counter of the curry house as we waited for our order. It didn’t really matter if the magazines were a few months – or even years – out of date, because I always found reading about Brad and Jen’s relationship dramas or Oprah’s weight problems strangely comforting. They reminded me there are some things that just don’t change in this world.

One Sunday, after a frantic day of dropping off and picking up kids, I was flicking through the stack of magazines while we waited for our takeaway when I noticed a magazine I hadn’t seen before. Intrigued, I chose it over my normal reading fare of three-year-old NWs and Woman’s Days from six months before.

Cosmetic Surgery was the title of the magazine, which surprised me because I couldn’t imagine a whole magazine being devoted to this one topic. Surely it was just an advertising wraparound or a dummy copy? But no, it turned out to be for real. Flicking through its two hundred or so glossy pages of articles, pictures and features on the joys of cosmetic surgery, I was struck by the fact that such a magazine could exist. What did it say about us as a society? Still, it was creepily fascinating – until, on page 43, I came across an ad that truly shocked me. Not, I hope, because I’m a prude, but because of what it said about the lengths some people will go to in order to make women feel ashamed of their bodies and therefore submit themselves, expensively, to the knife.

CORRECTIVE LABIAL SURGERY! screamed the headline, with the rest of the page largely taken up by two close-up photos of a hairy vagina. The photos were arranged side by side, the captions under them reading Before and After. Now for reasons that I’d rather not go into too deeply (let’s just say a misspent youth and a past penchant for porn), I’ve seen my fair share of hairy vaginas, but no matter how closely I studied them the two pictures looked exactly the same to me. I couldn’t spot the difference.

My careful study was interrupted by a loud and disapproving, ‘Excuse me, do you mind?’ from the elderly lady behind me in the queue. She was clearly disgusted to find the father of four young kids peering intently at what appeared to be pornography in her local curry shop.

‘What were you looking at, Daddy?’ asked Grace, my eldest daughter and, with her twin sister Eve, one of the sweetest girls on the planet.

‘Nothing, sweetheart,’ I replied, hastily shuffling the magazine back into the pile.

‘Show us,’ said Eve.

‘Yeah, show us, Dad,’ my younger son chimed in.

Fortunately I was saved from further embarrassment by the arrival of our food order.

On the walk home, I thought about the messed-up society we live in. Call me a bluff old traditionalist, but whatever the ads say, cosmetic surgery on your lady lips is not really likely to be the path to happiness. I feared for my daughters – and, for that matter, my sons. What on earth were my boys going to think if, in their courting years, they ever came up against a woman who didn’t have unobtrusive labia or hadn’t waxed herself into a landing strip or Brazilian?

If it’s occasionally challenging being a man facing fifty, I mused, what the hell must it be like to be a woman, with all the extra crap they have to deal with? Only the week before I’d been buying a bottle of water from a café when I noticed five middle-aged women who looked like they’d had a group discount from the same plastic surgeon. They all sported trout pouts, shiny foreheads and exaggeratedly arched eyebrows, with not a facial wrinkle in sight. Yet none of them (from the evidence of their hands and necks) could have been a day under fifty. While they looked grotesque to me, I could only imagine the pressure any of them might feel if she were the only one in the group who chose not to have surgery and to look her real age.

The American phrase ‘the new normal’ sums up what’s happening here. A good friend of mine who works in the media swears that there is not a single female TV newsreader over thirty who doesn’t have Botox injections as a matter of routine. It’s getting to the stage where it’s normal to look like a plastic doll and shameful to mature naturally.

My encounter with Cosmetic Surgery didn’t just make me think about unhealthy female body issues and our increasing inability to cope with ageing gracefully, it also brought me back to the thoughts I’d been having about my work and life. I had worked in the advertising industry for over twenty years and although I had issues with some of the things I’d witnessed, I’m in no way one of those ‘advertising is evil’ people – I’m proud of the work I’ve done, in fact. I’ve spent many wonderful years in advertising and met some truly fabulous people. Indeed, I even married one. But I was increasingly questioning the point of my labours. It wasn’t so much that there was anything wrong with the advertising industry, it was more that there wasn’t enough right with it. While I’d never worked on a corrective-labial-surgery account, I still couldn’t help feeling that the advertising world’s contribution to the overall happiness of society was, shall we say, minimal. The whole point of advertising is to get people to buy more stuff or ‘improve’ themselves and, to be honest, I wasn’t convinced that either was really the answer to the world’s ills. I wanted to be engaged in labour that had more heart.

I spoke to Kate about my misgivings, and she agreed that if this was the type of pretentious self-indulgent musing that a simple trip to the curry house brought on, maybe a change to regain some perspective might be a good idea.

3

Six Fish

Another large part of my increasing desire to yet again step off the corporate wheel was my frustration at how much time a serious corporate job takes away from your family life. I know it sounds like a cliché to say, ‘I’m leaving work to spend more time with my family’ but that’s really what I was thinking of doing. Being a senior professional in a large company made it very hard to be meaningfully engaged in the lives of my four young kids on a day-to-day basis. Whatever the spin about flexitime or child-friendly work cultures, the brutal reality of the corporate ladder means you miss huge chunks of your children’s lives and, at best, fit some rushed family moments around work rather than the other way around.

Both seeing my father in the nursing home and travelling with the family around England had made spending the precious time I had left with the kids while they were still at home – and were still (reasonably) happy to be seen with me – even more important. Yet, despite valiant efforts, I’d found it almost impossible to fit this time into our normal everyday routine. As a result I was forever planning activities we could do together on weekends, signing the family up for fun runs and ocean swims – not for the events themselves, but for the sheer pleasure of spending a few hours as a family unit. Sometimes, however, I ended up booking the poor kids for things they had no interest in doing; what I thought of as special family time, they thought was a total pain in the arse. I’d also learnt that, most times, the special moments just happen rather than being organised to order. But to have those moments I needed to be with them, not at the office pretending that texted updates on the school play or sports day were a meaningful substitute.

Spending time with Kate and the kids was one of the reasons I’d come to love long car journeys. Many people I know would rather saw their legs off than spend a four-hour journey in the car with their kids, what with the bickering, the vomiting and the endless chorus of ‘Are we there yet?’ I understand why people install all manner of gadgets in their cars to shut the kids up. A DVD player with individual headphones can make a long trip almost pleasant. But I like the idea of us all being trapped in a metal box for a few hours and forced to engage with each other, warts and all.

During the UK trip this lesson was brought home to me in dramatic fashion when, after visiting Mum and experiencing the trauma of seeing my father in such a bad way, it was time to head north to see Kate’s parents. Barely a two-hour drive in normal circumstances, this trip turned out to be anything but normal. Unbeknownst to us, we were setting off into what would turn out to be the worst snowfall in England since 1961.

Half an hour into our trip we found ourselves stuck in a twelve-mile-long queue of idling cars as a blizzard raged around us. It wasn’t long before the people in the cars in front of and behind us started abandoning their vehicles and walking to shelter. On the news the next day we were to learn that more than two thousand cars were abandoned overnight outside Reading alone. And where were we going? Yep – Reading.

Due to budgetary constraints our hire car was – how shall I put it? – not top of the range. In fact it was the cheapest car I could legally hire, so it was not four-wheel drive and there were no snow chains in the boot. We had, at least, borrowed Kate’s father’s sat nav, so we did have a helpful female voice repeatedly asking us to turn into roads that were blocked off by the police or simply impassable. The sat-nav lady became such a feature of the journey that I suggested to the kids we name her.

‘What about calling her Dixie?’ my younger son Harry offered.

‘Dixie?’ I asked.

‘Yeah – Dixie Normous,’ he elaborated.

Cue an explosion of hilarity from his brother and sisters. And I’m sure I caught Kate smiling out of the corner of my eye.

The kids were excited by the heavy snow so the practicalities of how we were going to get to Kate’s parents’ house, or where we were going to spend the night if we couldn’t, hadn’t yet registered with them.

At one stage, after we’d inched along about five centimetres in ten minutes, we saw a huge snowman by the road.

‘Hey, kids, look at the snowman,’ I said.

‘It’s great – what shall we call him?’ said Grace.

‘Phil,’ Harry replied.

‘Phil?’ I asked.

‘Phil McGroin,’ he answered.

What were they teaching him at school? I wondered as the twins collapsed into giggles.

It was at this stage that the electronic display started flashing a warning that the left rear door was open.

‘Alex, mate, push your door closed for me, will you?’ I asked my son.

Alex pushed the sliding door as hard as he could. The open-door light stayed on, but was now joined by an irritating electronic bing, bing, bing noise.

‘Mate, it’s still not closed,’ I said.

‘Yes it is. It’s closed.’

We were gridlocked anyway so I got out and opened and closed it myself, to no avail. The warning light stayed on and the bing, bing, bing noise kept bing binging.

Amid the double-entendring and ‘binging’ I was actually becoming quite worried at the conditions outside. The kids, on the other hand, were having a wild time.

‘Spotto!’ yelled Eve, on glimpsing a yellow car.

‘Spotto! Spotto!’ yelled Grace. ‘I saw it first.’

For some reason, they found calling ‘Spotto!’ whenever they saw a yellow car or van highly amusing – even more so after Harry amended the rules and started yelling ‘Snotto’ whenever he saw a green car.

For the next nine hours we crept along accompanied by an incessant bing, bing soundtrack and regular calls of ‘Spotto!’ Meanwhile, I caught up on the latest phrases they were using, something that always fascinated me. Barely three hours in and I’d already been told to ‘Calm your farm’ by Harry when my frustration with the weather got the better of me. ‘Yeah, Dad, buy a ticket to Chilladelphia,’ Eve chipped in. When Kate came to my defence she was advised to ‘chillax’.

Eventually we approached Reading, only to be stopped by the police at the top of a hill on the outskirts of the city. By this time it was late at night and the snow hadn’t let up at all. Ahead of us was a steep descent followed by a long, winding incline. The police were only letting one car attempt the hill at a time because so few cars were making it. The verges on either side of the road were littered with what looked like hundreds of cars.

When we were about ten cars or so from the front of the queue, we got out and watched a car set off. Down the hill it sped, then up the other side it went before going into a skid and veering straight into the hedge at the side of the road. The driver got out and trudged back down the hill on foot. The next car to set off went into the ditch on the other side of the road. Yet another stayed out of the hedge, but got caught in a wheel spin halfway up the hill and could make it no further. It was followed by a huge Jeep/tractor affair that made it over the hill with ease, to the cheers of both the police and the waiting motorists.

Four more cars attempted the incline without success and I was starting to feel strangely like I was in one of those Japanese game shows where the guests line up one by one to attempt a pointless and ultimately painful stunt.

We got back into the car to wait our turn, and a few minutes later a policeman tapped on my window.

‘Good evening, Officer,’ I said, winding down the window.

‘I’ll say,’ he replied. ‘It’s been quite a night. Most people are hunkering down to sleep in their cars or legging it if they live nearby. Are you sure you want to try this?’

‘We’ve been going for nine hours so I don’t think I can face giving up now,’ I replied. ‘What chances do you give us?’

‘Well, if you’ve got four-wheel drive I’d say it’s fifty per cent. If not, you’re totally screwed,’ he answered.

On hearing this, Grace started crying. The police officer, who hadn’t noticed the kids in the back, apologised sheepishly for both his language and scaring the life out of them.

‘What is that noise?’ he added.

‘Oh, it’s the electrics. They’re convinced the side door is open, though it’s definitely not. It’s been doing that for hours. You get used to it after a while.’

He looked unconvinced, but didn’t question me futher. As he prepared to move off, he offered me the following advice: ‘Stay in a low gear, don’t over-rev, steer into the skid if you feel the car sliding and don’t go too slowly on the way down the hill – a bit of speed actually helps.’

I thanked him, wound up the window and took a deep breath, feeling like I’d unwittingly found myself in the queue for the ski jump at the Winter Olympics.

‘Is this car four-wheel drive, Daddy?’ Eve asked.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

The boys were excited. ‘Go for it, Dad!’ they yelled as the policeman motioned us forward. Screw a low gear – I didn’t have any gears. I just took the policeman at his word and hurtled down the hill.

Miraculously, we made it up the other side with barely a wheel spin. Admittedly there was one hairy skid at the bend on the brow of the hill, but by steering into it we were fine. By the time we got to the top of the next hill the whole family was hollering and hooting as if we were on a rollercoaster.

‘That was fantastic, Dad!’ Alex yelled.

Even Grace had stopped crying and started laughing.

‘Well done, darling,’ said Kate, putting her hand on my thigh.

I felt ridiculously proud. Of myself – and of the hire car. Maybe Kias weren’t so shite after all.

The celebrations were interrupted by a huge fart.

‘Safe!’ yelled Harry.

‘No! Six fish!’ yelled Grace and Eve in unison, then they began punching him in the arm. This was another car ‘game’. If you let one off you got punched in the arm until you’d shouted out six types of fish. Don’t ask me why, I haven’t a clue.

‘Salmon . . . Ow! . . . Cod . . . Ow . . . Too hard, Grace,’ said Harry. ‘Shark . . . Trout . . . You’re hurting . . . Skate . . . Octopus.’

‘An octopus isn’t a fish!’

‘Shark,’ Harry shouted.

‘You’ve already said shark,’ Eve crowed, continuing the punching.

‘Groper,’ Harry gasped.

The punching stopped. The smell lingered. The binging continued.

After two more hours of crawling through the snow we finally turned into Kate’s parents’ street. As if to prove everything had gone too well, as soon as we sighted the house the car slid into a nearby verge and, after much revving and swearing, we realised we were stuck. It was now two o’clock in the morning, pitch black and still snowing heavily, yet everyone got out, laughing and shouting, and pushed the car the last few metres home – after a journey that had taken eleven and a half hours door to door with two adults, four kids, no food, no DVDs and an awful lot of binging.

Next day, the storm was all over the morning news. CNN even led with a story hamming up the Dunkirk spirit angle. The abandoned cars, the traffic jams, the nights spent in pubs and offices, the never-ending delays, the satellite pictures of England all white, strangers helping strangers.

Soon the phone started ringing off the hook with concerned friends and family.

‘Must have been awful,’ was the reaction when we recounted our story.

True, it had been mildly dangerous and we were lucky to make it, but it hadn’t been awful at all. In fact it was one of the best parts of the entire holiday. Fabulous, joyous and memorable. On 21 December 2009, I spent over eleven hours trapped in a car with my wife and kids – and I loved every single minute of it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent that amount of time with my wife and kids without electronic entertainment (well, other than Dixie Normous). By my reckoning that’s at least five mealtimes in one go.

I’m not saying I wanted to leave work to sit in traffic jams in blizzards, but I did want to organise my life in such a way that there didn’t have to be freakish circumstances for us to spend fun, quality time together.

4

Me and Steve Martin

One big question remained: if I was really serious about leaving traditional office work again, what would I do instead? Time with the kids was one thing, but for half the day they would all be at school.

I knew all too well the dangers of sitting at home with not enough to do. It’s easy to become soft and directionless without a specific focus – a ‘park bencher’ as one of my friends calls it. You can even find yourself reading junk mail and writing to-do lists comprising things like ‘Clean teeth’ and ‘Pants before shoes’. I remembered an occasion during a previous hiatus from work when I’d only had one thing to do that day – buy pork chops for dinner. As I ran up the hill in my pyjamas at 5 pm, trying to get to the butcher before it closed, I was thinking, ‘I haven’t got the time for all these jobs! I mean I’ve got to clean my teeth and then there’s the pork chops.’

More to the point, if I was going to leave the full-time workforce, what were we going to live on? Two previous breaks from the corporate world had put paid to any notion of savings, so our financial situation was what my financial adviser had rather quaintly called ‘sub-optimal’. ‘Rooted’, more like. There was, however, a glimmer of light on the horizon, as for the last couple of years Kate had been seriously considering going back to work. I was actively encouraging her. Not because I wanted her to return to the workforce to fund time out of it for me, but because I had always felt secretly guilty that she’d had to give up her career. It may have made perfect sense after we had kids for us to split the domestic burden along traditional lines – me bringing in the money, her bringing up the babies – but that didn’t change the fact that it was a huge sacrifice for her. She had been excellent at her job and was clearly destined for the top. Although she never complained, I knew how deeply she felt it when other women told her tales of their progress up the career ladder. I believed her when she said she didn’t regret her decision for a moment but, nevertheless, ten years on it seemed the time was right for her to re-enter the world of conventional work.

But wanting to do it is one thing, doing it is another. A decade away from the workforce can do terrible things to your confidence. For many women it can be a battle to maintain their self-belief and self-esteem during a lengthy child-rearing break, especially when they are frequently referred to and treated as ‘merely a mother’.

On top of the personal challenges for women returning to the workforce, there is the reality of actually getting a job after a ten-year break. It’s only natural for prospective employers to wonder if you’ve lost your edge, energy and relevance after such a long time out of the loop. Why should they take a risk on a ‘re-entrant’ when they could simply hire someone who’s currently in a job and has an unbroken career history? A friend of mine recently told me at the school gates that she’d spent seven years gaining her qualifications and twenty years building her career. Yet after a break to see her kids through to kindergarten age, she’d found it hard to get a job that paid half decently. ‘I just want to earn more than I pay my babysitter,’ she told me, with grim determination in her voice.

And, finally, the global economy was experiencing a pretty spectacular meltdown just as Kate was thinking about finding a job – companies were downsizing, not expanding.

So all in all, while I was hopeful about Kate’s future employment, it would have been moronic to bank on it happening soon enough and successfully enough to support the family.

It was clear I needed a plan. My initial thoughts on the matter had all the hallmarks of one of Baldrick’s cunning plans in an episode of Blackadder. Namely, that I would sing for our collective supper by writing another book.

Now it is well known that writing is about as effective as a chocolate teapot when it comes to providing a living wage. Especially in Australia. Even a bestseller pays you four-fifths of fuck-all. On top of that, my track record was patchy to say the least. I have the dubious distinction of having come up with literally the worst book title in publishing history. Might as well be famous for something, I suppose. Yes, for reasons best known to myself, and against good advice, I called my last book Observations of a Very Short Man.

Now, I love that title, which relates to a story about my gorgeous younger son, Harry. At the time it also struck me as self-deprecating, which was vitally important to me because I have a terror of being seen as one of those know-it-all self-help authors who think they have all the answers. None of which changes the fact that as a title it was rubbish. Understandably, given the title, many potential readers thought it was a book about short people or that I was in fact very short. Browsers in bookshops either had no interest in a height-challenged view of the world and walked on, or were fascinated by the idea and then mightily pissed off when they got home and found out that the book had nothing whatsoever to do with being short. To put it bluntly, it was nothing short of a disaster. So much so that the publishers asked me to come up with another title when it went into a second format. After much musing, and in the spirit of Fat, Forty and Fired, I suggested Overworked and Underlaid. Everyone was happy and the book was retitled.

Two weeks after Overworked and Underlaid went into shops, I was walking through the centre of Melbourne when I passed a huge bookshop with an impressive display of recommended new releases in the front window. And blow me down if Overworked and Underlaid wasn’t slap-bang in the centre of the display. Even better, it was right next to Steve Martin’s brand-new autobiography Born Standing Up. Now, I love Steve Martin’s films, his stand-up, his music – and his writing. He is a Hollywood star, hugely talented and a much-loved household name – and here I was being given equal billing with the great man.

With shameful vanity I got out my iPhone and took a picture of this testimony to my greatness before calling Kate to brag.

‘Sweetheart, you’ll never guess what. I’m standing on the street outside the big Borders in Melbourne and Overworked and Underlaid is in the front window – right next to Steve Martin’s latest book. I mean, mine’s prominently displayed side by side with Steve Martin!’

‘M-A-R,’ Kate replied.

‘Pardon?’ I said.

‘M-A-R,’ she repeated.

‘What do you mean, “M-A-R”? What are you on about? I’m trying to tell you my boat’s come in – your husband is so famous he’s getting equal billing with Hollywood stars like Steve Martin.’

‘They’re in alphabetical order, Nigel,’ she explained in a rather withering tone.

I looked again at the display and bugger me if she wasn’t right. There I was, above all the Ns and beneath all the Ls, among all the Ms.

Doesn’t mean I haven’t kept the photo on my iPhone anyway (or that I haven’t cropped it to cut out all the other books so on the ‘rare’ occasion I show it to someone they can’t make the same deduction that my sweet wife made . . . )

Leaving aside dud titles and all the other problems of writing, there is now a whole new set of challenges that mean the possibility of making money out of writing is even more remote. I’m talking technology, more specifically e-readers like the Kindle – or the Instrument of the Devil, as I like to call it.

Last Christmas I was given a Kindle. It was a thoughtful and generous gift, but the trouble is I love books. Not just reading books but holding books, giving books, making notes in books, recommending books, scanning bookshelves and loitering in libraries and second-hand bookshops. Browsing in a bookshop is one of my favourite activities. And I not only love paperbacks, but the paper itself. And the ink. And the binding. And the glue. The whole book thing just works for me.

And then along comes the bloody Kindle – a piece of plastic crap with type on the screen. Quite apart from the horror of the useless non-book experience of reading a book from a screen on what feels like an oversized phone, it’s the economic ramifications that are terrifying for writers. It’s hard enough to make any money when you know the rules, but now, with e-books, Amazon, books on your mobile, Google scanning, iPads and illegal downloads, no one really knows how it’s all going to end up – apart from the sure-fire guarantee that somehow writers will be paid less for their output.

At first I refused even to take the Kindle out of its box.

Then, after eight days of ignoring it, politeness towards the person who’d given it to me propelled me to at least charge it up. After I did so a remarkable thing happened. To test the bloody thing out I attempted to buy an obscure book by an American stand-up comedian. Ping! It appeared within seconds. I then thought I’d prove my point by reading a few pages to show how crap an experience it was.

And you know what? It was brilliant. Really wonderful. The iPad even better. I suspect that in years to come, packing a physical book in a suitcase to take on holiday will be like wanting to send a message by carrier pigeon rather than via email. Sort of: ‘No, no I won’t take that thin light Kindle with two thousand books in it. I’d rather actual books, which will be heavier, more expensive and less convenient.’

Talk about timing. I had resolved to leave my job and write a book at precisely the time books were going out of fashion. I could just about get my head around earning no money and writing for the love of it, but it’s the fact that it’s difficult to be next to Steve Martin on the bookshelf if there isn’t a bookshelf, or indeed a bookshop, that I was having trouble coming to terms with.

5

The Hamster Wheel