How In Hell?

I arrived in Canada in the early hours of April 29, 1980. We’d just survived a flight from New York City so storm-tossed it felt more like a seizure. My father was irritable and full of anxiety, and my mother wrung her hands (and still does). I was sixteen; the same age my son is now. 

The move has worked out well for me. My kids are fantastic young people and I’m writing this in the warm kitchen of a downtown Kingston Ontario house I like very much. Apart from a heartbeat that has a sick mind of its own some days, my body’s holding up. Business is good, better than good maybe.

It’s not all positive news. How insufferable would that be? I’ve lost one sister and don’t talk to the other one. My mother labours every day with the after-effects of a shit time with cancer. I miss England and I miss it not at all. Life is a mixed bag, in other words, much like yours, I bet, and I’d not swap it for any other.

I’ve evolved, of course. From a reclusive nervous kid, scared to express above a whisper his own opinions, into a … well I don’t know quite what I am, my life hasn’t settled into a completely firm shape reducible to a few words. Has yours? I’m slightly less reclusive, and much more argumentative. More generous and yet more selfish too. A little fogged-in when I wake, and a sentimental fool by the end of the day. A work in progress.

I was at the gym this morning, trying to slow the slide, both physical and mental. I paused to check an email and afterwards started up the music again on my phone. I accidentally took a screenshot of the playlist’s next few songs and looking over that list I realise that my taste in music has its origins very much in late 1970s England.

In early May 1980 (at the Square One Shopping Centre in god-forsaken Mississauga) I bought copies of the debut albums by The Clash and The Undertones, and did my best to wear them out. I was trying, I suppose, to bring England to me, since a return was impossible. I was seeking comfort in noise. It was the blanket I wrapped myself in. I’ve been carrying that cape ever since.

I’m the same with news and with football. I turn first to The Guardian most mornings, and it’s Tottenham Hotspur’s fortunes I follow more closely than any of my relatives’. It’s odd, I think, that I gain such solace from a place a lifetime and a world away. But the importance of that time, the realisation that my youth informs everything I am, makes me wish I’d seen more of my kids the last few years, because it’s likely they’ll look back just as intently on their opening dozen and a half years.

These days, I take stock more than I ever have. I’ve become a bit preoccupied with my age, which is a way I suppose of examining the distance I’ve travelled since that rough flight in 1980. Weirdly, I’ve acquired a habit of comparing my age to that of  Premier League soccer managers. I’m sure it’s because I know the ages of these other middle-aged white guys. Their birth date is deemed an essential part of their narrative. The journalists’ and commentators’ idea is, I think, that young managers have new ideas, innovative ways of playing the game. And that those ideas suffer as they age. It’s a sad (and sadly accurate) way of judging most of them. And so when they’re hired and fired, their age is noted high in the mix. And I pay undue attention.

This morning it was Spurs versus Watford I watched. And I don’t know why I bothered really. Spurs play less attractive football every week now that world-class misanthrope Jose Mourinho has taken over the team, and I see little reason for optimism. He’s not a pleasant human being, but for some reason his 56 years sit lightly on him. Perhaps by so casually excreting all the bile he manages to preserve the flesh. His appearance frustrates me. One so negative should be wizened, it seems to me, bent, more Gollum than Pitt. 

Nigel Pearson (Watford) is 56 too and looks more like my dad than my twin brother. Tougher than my dad, but you get the idea. A hard uncle. David Moyes (West Ham these days) is the same age and that seems about right. He’s the guy who walks into one of those booths at the county fair where they guess your age and weight and the barker just laughs it all so obvious. He’s a poster boy for mid-50s. 

Brendan Rogers (Leicester) is 46 and I had a teacher like him once, fond of the plimsoll, he was. But that’s no help. Chris Wilder is a hell of a coach and he’s performing miracles at Sheffield Utd this year, but only 52? Really? Fuck off. That hurts. Jurgen Klopp, the brilliant, likable Liverpool manager, is also 52 and while the teeth don’t seem quite real, he leaps around the touchline like someone who stays up late most nights and steers catamarans singlehandedly across the channel on weekdays.

Klopp, away from the catamaran

The pathetically vain question at the root of all this is, How old would I look pacing the touchline? Where would I stand in a line-up of all these coaches. Where, between Arteta (Arsenal, 37) at one end and Hodgson (72, Crystal Palace) at the other, would I be slotted if I hid my birth certificate in my sock. The much more important question is, Why the hell does it matter? I should give the dumb inquiry no headspace, let alone write about it.

But there I am. I dwell on such things. And I doubt I’m alone. There are (in my defence) many less narcissistic concerns too. The world is going to shit and there must be some small ways I can help. I ponder those matters seriously, and rail grimly against idiocy and injustice and Trump.

Music helps a lot to steady the ship, and fuel the engine, and the gym does its part as well. The kids too, the way they hurtle down a ski slope ahead of me. There is sustenance in that, and in the way I chase them down the greens like a pre-arthritic Wile. E. Coyote on skis, humbled by their casual talent but full of some late-in-the-day ambition too.

I’ll stop pretty much where I began. On the tarmac back at Pearson International. It was a little after 2 a.m. when we landed. A couple hours in Immigration and then we trudged to a cab and the next morning began afresh, with blueberry pancakes and milkshakes in a hotel restaurant. A realtor picked us up from the hotel in a lime-green car that was about thirty yards long, and drove us along a superhighway from one horrid house to another. I didn’t hate him, or even resent him, but I did regard him I’m sure as some sort of alien. I lolled from side to side in the acre of back seat. Power lines divided the sky. My sisters and I, as well as my mother, looked at each other with what – excitement, uncertainty, trepidation, panic? 

We didn’t all make it to 2020. And I think about that a lot, how quickly it can all disappear (that’s the obvious end-point of this useless worry about age). I think on our ways of moving through the world. How we can choose to organise our itineraries, our careers, and our utterances, in either selfish or altruistic fashion. Occasionally I drift to this sort of consideration as I ferry new clients around town. I go so far then as to imagine it’s me I see in the rear-view, 16 years-old and dealing in the back seat with whatever move it is my parents have planned, the future beginning to stream like spilled rocket fuel past the windows.