Birthday Special: You can't spell "41-year-old man" without "old man"
It's my mirthday and you'll cry — with laughter! — if I want you to, but not until after a lengthy tale of beans
Today is my birthday. I’ve been alive for some 41 years now (not to be confused with Sum 41 years, which for complex reasons are seven times as long as human years). Forty-one. That is rather alarming. I currently have a lot of work to do. Here, instead, is a too-long anecdote about beans and stress — a birthday present from me to you — then probably about five jokes.
Sometimes people ask questions like, “How are you?” or “How’s it going?” and I give far too long an answer.
I’m a tightly-wound man. I get very, very stressed. Sometimes the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of my life triangulate in a way that feels needlessly difficult, where a combination of decisions I’ve made and pure straightforward bad luck add up to, well, a bit too much. But other times I just get into a state where it doesn’t seem to take a lot to turn me into a broken shambles.
I seem to have a knack for getting into situations that are both highly stressful and extremely stupid. Or they make perfect sense to me, but explaining them to anyone else feels like it would take so long, and involve describing so many questionable decisions on the way, that it just doesn’t seem worth it.
(There was a point last year where a journey home was made more difficult than it needed to be because my rucksack was covered in someone else’s sick. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why, but it’s long enough that earnestly explaining it would make me seem more unhinged — less hinged — than just letting it go unremarked upon. There I was, my bag dripping in chunks of a stranger’s chunder, and then the notable incident began.)
Here you go: On a recent Tuesday evening I made myself some beans on toast. Nothing remarkable about that so far. I don’t like to show off too much, but it wasn’t even something I found particularly difficult or was enormously concerned about the cost of. What can I say? I’m a champion.
Tuesday is a complicated evening with a lot of moving parts — my daughter has two clubs in different places, my wife has a regular fixture in Cambridge, there’s one car, inconsistent buses, an odd number of working limbs, it’s all fiddly and daft and often involves the three of us eating dinner at three different times. On this occasion I’d made a very rubbish easy dinner that came out smaller than anticipated so had been eaten entirely by the other two, so after I put my daughter to bed I had to make myself something.
See how long that is already? That’s the shortened version that doesn’t go into all the little preposterous extra bits that make it somehow about eight times as stressful as it feels like it needs to be (how many different pairs of shoes do you think are involved in this series of events? The answer is significantly more than you’d think). There are whole ongoing things involving a selective mute, a mad old racist and a complicated membership scheme that just chip, chip, chip away.
I’m aware this all sounds really arrogant, like an adolescent showy-off “nobody knows my pain” kind of thing. You don’t know my Tuesday! You couldn’t handle my Tuesday! Like when a teenager falls in love and feels confident nobody else has ever felt anything comparable. Everyone’s stressed, and everyone’s stresses are unique. I lead a pretty easy, pleasant life.
But in the heat of the moment when something incredibly stupid and unlikely happens, when it’s all so ridiculous and thick that nobody could ever feel sorry for you, it feels briefly like the biggest thing the world contains. I lost my job when I had a small baby, and while long-term that caused an enormous amount of upset, in the moment it was happening it was nowhere near as overwhelming as, say, when I tried to chain my bike to a wooden gate last year and the chain was too short and the wood was too thick and the bike kept falling over and I was holding onto a cuddly gorilla in one hand and I just descended into madness way too quickly.
But, anyway, I made some beans on toast. Two slices of buttered toast, a whole can of beans. I didn’t need a whole can of beans. However, having half a can of beans and storing the other half in an old takeaway container in the fridge feels like I’m just creating something to throw away in two weeks’ time. So a whole can of beans for me. Too many beans, some would say! But, a whole can of beans for me. (I am Mike.)
I strode towards the sofa, where I was going to sit and watch the previous evening’s University Challenge, then I realised I’d forgotten to add cheese. I stopped abruptly. The beans, however, didn’t. The forward momentum my walk had created continued after my body stopped moving, and a wave of beans flowed over the side of my plate and all over a basket of folded laundry at my feet.
In a split second:
My plate went from containing too many beans to not containing enough beans.
The laundry basket went from not having anything to do with beans to containing a noteworthy amount of beans.
The subject of my thoughts went from I like cheese to I am the stupidest man alive.
It’s hard to describe exactly what happens to me in moments like that, but in short: everything. It feels, at those ridiculous instants, like every organ has spun around every other one and rendered my insides a snarl of ruptured, stretched knots. Like any given part of me might suddenly explode in so forceful a way that the walls will need cleaning. Like there’ll be a brief ripping sound, every blood vessel in my eyeballs will turn black and crimson tears will flow silently down my cheeks.
I used to have a recurring dream where I’d find a hair sticking out of the tear duct of my eye, and pull it out. It would keep coming, longer and longer, with a pleasant sort of tickling sensation (like pulling off a big long chunk of sleep when you are nine and have conjunctivitis), then suddenly everything would go black as I cheese-wired through my optic nerve and sliced a chunk out of my brain, and as I dropped to the ground in darkness with death washing over me, could only think, “That was silly of me.” That’s how those beans made me feel.
(The thing that adds an absurd, maddening level to this absurd, maddening story? There’s precedent for it. About six months ago, I was tidying the kitchen, half-humming the song Eye Of The Tiger to myself and doing an internal percussion thing inside my mouth using breath, saliva and my teeth. I opened the dishwasher and something went wrong and I spat all over the clean dishes and didn’t feel great about myself on that occasion either.)
What actually happens, of course, is nowhere near as dramatic — no blood flies anywhere, I just get flustered and annoyed and stressed and clumsy and make noises like Joe Pesci in Home Alone where he can’t quite complete an entire word. And then I look from one thing to another, confused, trying to work out if I can somehow un-make whatever mistake I’ve just made, or whether there’s some way it can be anyone’s fault other than mine.
On this occasion I looked from the plate to the basket and back again several times, briefly wondering if this could somehow be the fault of the basket manufacturer, then sighed sadly. I cleaned up the beans, and re-washed the laundry, and ate something else, and wondered whether maybe that brief period when my heart was beating faster than light might have done me some damage health-wise.
It’s like that song: “Beans, beans, the fruit that’s great / Upon some toast, upon your plate / But don’t you spill them on your laundry / OH GOD OH JESUS CHRIST ALL THE CLOTHES OH NO THAT’S SO MUCH BEANS I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT JUST HAPPENED.”
But yeah, no, yeah, no I’m alright. Thanks. Thanks for asking. Funny that people don’t ask more often really!
FIVE JOKES AFTER ALL THAT
one
“A friend of mine spends his time daydreaming and working out the volumes of different containers of orangeade.”
'“Fanta sizing?”
“Yes, and working out the volumes of different containers of orangeade.”
two
“Ever since you started washing with a gourd you’ve been acting more detached.”
“A loofah?”
“Yes, and more haughty and stand-offish.”
three
I’ve just met a man who appears to be made out of frozen water and has a core temperature of below zero degrees. Seems like an ice guy!
four
A Roman I know, but have very little in common with, needed my help counting down from one-hundred-and-one to one. Eventually we managed to put aside our differences; CI to I.
five
I recently bought a bowl online, and when it arrived in had a chip in it. Yum!
If you enjoyed this, thanks. Please share it with people, or commission me for some work, or PayPal me £5.30 for a delicious pint of Kronenbourg. The next proper normal monthly instalment is on April 5th. This was meant to be one paragraph leading into a punchline about “spilling the beans”. Sorry/you’re welcome. Maybe I could have ended it with “got there, done that, beaned the t-shirt”. I don’t know. I don’t know anything!