Embracing the manopause as life moves from present to past

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Middle-age can hit you like a train; one day the world is your oyster, you embrace every day with a new joy and you can party all night long and still look as though you’ve had a solid eight hours sleep.

The next thing you know, you have to ease yourself out of the bed in case you pull a muscle in your back; the morning music is the beat of your knees cracking on the stairs and the only think you now save time on is your hair – because there’s not a lot left to work with.

We’ve come up with a name for this male change of life; we can call it the manopause.

There are no hot flushes but there are flushes for sure; the ones you do in the middle of the night after emptying your bladder for the umpteenth time.

And you wonder how, when you used to go out and enjoy a feed of pints, you never had to get up for the toilet – but now that you never go anywhere on a week night, you’re in and out of the look like a leaking bucket.

The manopause manifests itself though loss of hair and hearing; creaky bones and a complaining back – and most of all a propensity for telling old stories about what times were like when you were young.

It also involves giving out yards about the internet, and why a television with 100 channels still has nothing worth watching, whereas – back in the golden days of one station – you were somehow spoiled for choice.

You see a car with a 06 number plate and you don’t for a minute consider that to be 13 years old; when you watch Reeling in the Years, you actually remember all of those things happening in real-time and if, on the off chance, you know a Galway footballer or hurler, it’s only because you went to school with their father.

Or grandfather.

The first manifestation of the manopause is an increasing interest in nostalgia; reflections on a simple time when you played outside all day with your mates, equipped with nothing more than a cheap football and jumpers for goalposts.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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