How to Stay Happy if you're a Middle Aged Male.
1) Drink beer: Lots of it. Make it the focal point of your life. After all, everybody else you know does and they're all happy. Besides, if you don't drink lots of beer and spend half your life in the pub it must mean that you're harbouring gay urges and that won't sit well with your macho appearance.
2) Play darts: It's cheaper than golf, it's less hard work than squash and you get to drink loads of beer whilst you're doing it. On top of which darts players have great fat stomachs just like yours and they're sexy, right?
3) Read the tabloids: They're full of naked women and they simplify all those complicated politics into easy-to-understand bigotry. During the evening you can sit in the pub with your dominoes and your beer bellies and talk about how fit the Page Three girls are and who you'd 'roger' given half the chance. This more than makes up for the fact that your wife is frustrated and you haven't had sex for weeks. Who's to know? Your mates certainly won't and they're the ones that count, right? Who needs sex manuals? All that 'clitoral stimulation' and 'G Spot recognition'? Far too much like hard work and research if you ask me. Instead, you can impress your mates by wolf whistling 17 year old blondes in short skirts.
4) Education is for tossers: After all, you've made it this far without having to worry about 'sociology' and 'archaeology' and stuff. The only education you need is to know the football stats for the last fifty years and how many pints it takes to get inside the barmaid's knickers. That'll keep you up with the Joneses and your peer group standing will be justly rewarded.
5) Wear denims and football shirts. It'll prove you're not old and queer. And the women'll love it. Especially if you hang a large gold pendant round your neck and give them a tantalising flash of your hairy nipples every so often.
6) Make sure you go out to the pub every night: Where you can joke with your chums about how you've left the wife with the blooming kids. Sure you made a mistake having children in the first place. Well, everyone was doing it at the time and it seemed like a good idea. But that's no excuse for being miserable now and having to spend quality drinking time watching them grow up. Staying in at nights only means that you'll have to talk with the missus and you know how laborious that can be. No, bugger that! Get drunk and watch football down the pub instead.
7) Above all: Remember, if it's good enough for your mates then it's good enough for you. You don't see them regretting the mindless inanity of their lives, do you? They don't go round talking to women that they don't actually want to sleep with. Or reading books or discussing politics or art or philosophy. Keep watching the football, mates! Keep drinking that beer and watching the football and ogling the dolly birds and stinking of Mandate and eating those extra-strong curries and laughing at students and talking bollocks in a patronising manner and avoiding books and dodging your inner self and making racist jokes. And in no time at all you'll wake up one morning to discover you're too old to care about middle-age any longer and are facing death in the face with no more baggage than a lifetime of darts and misogyny and alcohol. It's great!
