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A Shed of One's Own: Midlife Without the Crisis
For many men, middle age arrives too fast and without due warning. One day you are young, free and single; the next you are bald, fat and washed-up, with weird tendrils of hair growing out of your ears. None of it seems fair. With age should come dignity and respect, but instead everyone makes tired jokes about buying a motorbike. Marcus Berkmann isn't having it. Having marked his fiftieth birthday by hiding under the duvet for six weeks, the author of the cricket classics Rain Men and Zimmer Men is now determined to find some light in the all-consuming darkness. Musing over birth, death and all the messy stuff in between, he concludes that however dreadful you look in the mirror today, it will be much worse in ten years' time. His brutally candid despatch from the frontline is not for the faint-hearted, which is to say anyone under thirty-five.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 19, 2012
7 people are currently reading
53 people want to read
About the author
Marcus Berkmann
39 books11 followersMarcus Berkmann was educated at Highgate School and Worcester College in Oxford in the UK. He began his career as a freelance journalist, contributing to computer and gaming magazines such as Your Sinclair. In the 1990s, he had stints as television critic for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express, and has written a monthly pop music column for The Spectator since 1987.
With his schoolfriend Harry Thompson, Berkmann scripted the BBC Radio comedy Lenin of the Rovers. He came to prominence with his novel Rain Men (1995), which humorously chronicles the formation and adventures of his own cricket-touring team, the Captain Scott Invitation XI.
Berkmann has continued to write newspaper and cricket magazine columns, such as the Last Man In column on the back page of Wisden Cricket Monthly, while producing a number of critically well-received humorous books.
In Brain Men (1999), he applied his sardonic observations to the world of pub quizzes, adopting a similar approach to Fatherhood (2005). In 2005, Berkmann released Zimmer Men, a quasi-sequel to Rain Men describing his transition into middle age with cricket.
Berkmann is also credited as being part of the writing team of the BBC Three comedy show Monkey Dust, and compiler of the Dumb Britain column in Private Eye magazine. In 2009, he set up the quiz company Brain Men with Stephen Arkell and Chris Pollikett.
A Shed of One's Own: Midlife Without the Crisis was serialised by BBC Radio 4 in its Book of the Week slot during 2012. A fan of Star Trek since its first British screening by the BBC in 1969, Set Phasers to Stun: 50 Years of Star Trek, aimed at the general reader, was published in March 2016.
With his schoolfriend Harry Thompson, Berkmann scripted the BBC Radio comedy Lenin of the Rovers. He came to prominence with his novel Rain Men (1995), which humorously chronicles the formation and adventures of his own cricket-touring team, the Captain Scott Invitation XI.
Berkmann has continued to write newspaper and cricket magazine columns, such as the Last Man In column on the back page of Wisden Cricket Monthly, while producing a number of critically well-received humorous books.
In Brain Men (1999), he applied his sardonic observations to the world of pub quizzes, adopting a similar approach to Fatherhood (2005). In 2005, Berkmann released Zimmer Men, a quasi-sequel to Rain Men describing his transition into middle age with cricket.
Berkmann is also credited as being part of the writing team of the BBC Three comedy show Monkey Dust, and compiler of the Dumb Britain column in Private Eye magazine. In 2009, he set up the quiz company Brain Men with Stephen Arkell and Chris Pollikett.
A Shed of One's Own: Midlife Without the Crisis was serialised by BBC Radio 4 in its Book of the Week slot during 2012. A fan of Star Trek since its first British screening by the BBC in 1969, Set Phasers to Stun: 50 Years of Star Trek, aimed at the general reader, was published in March 2016.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 27, 2013
This book is the A - Z, the Hope to Despair to Beyond Caring of men's middle age, or really, human middle age in the Anglosphere. Someone apparently doesn't understand this: his review on Amazon UK complains, without any hint of a joke, that there's not enough in it about sheds.
The book is seething and teeming with insights, wittily or even hilariously expressed and also clearly representing original thought about the subject matter. There is nothing of the borrowed or much-trodden in the book. Its subject is both researched and known intimately, inside out -- for the author was 50 while writing it: what might be called young middle age. But then again, as he explains, nobody can really agree on which age range qualifies as 'middle'.
There are infelicities, some of which bothered me more than they bother others, I expect. There was too much of the S word and the F word, for one thing. (Does anybody actually say or think 'you bag of f----?' I'm glad to say I've never heard the expression.) His rendering (p. 118) of a 'well-established American campus joke' substitutes 'mother------' at the punchline, which not only doesn't square with the vintage of the joke, but more to the point, puts a sour lemon in your mouth at the precise moment when you should have laughed. I know this because a very eminent American academic told me his version of the joke many years ago. His version wasn't prissy: the last word was 'asshole' (though 'jerk' would have done the job). The 'senior' student of Berkmann's version was a professor in my professor's, and the joke's professor added 'young man' at the end of his comments. Princeton wasn't mentioned. The joke I know comes across as less crass and belligerent. It's how you tell 'em.
It is also curious that none of Berkmann's editors or proofreaders was aware of the difference between 'margherita', which is a style of pizza, and 'margarita', which is a cocktail. So we have this sentence:
When we complete our long years of toil, we shall gain entry to a quiet, prosperous, pastel world of golfing holidays and Caribbean cruises, resting our weary limbs on padded deckchairs while sexually ambiguous serving staff mix our margheritas and massage our aching feet. (p. 53)
The idea of torture as a condign punishment, however unreal the context, appears twice in the book, which to my mind is two times too many. And no, my second thought on seeing rioters on TV is not that it 'looks as though it might be fun' (p. 21). And no, reading the obituary of someone younger than I whose life has been cut short gives me no joy whatsoever (p. 242). Witness the case of Charlotte Furness-Smith, a serving Navy veteran and prep-school math teacher (and a beautiful girl) who drowned recently in a Dorset sea cave. I've thought about it several times with a sense of the waste and the loss, not only to herself but to all that knew or could have known her. But that's reality. Sometimes Berkmann gets carried away with the need to keep a jolly detachment from it.
Still, the man can write, and what's more he gets his teeth right in, without worrying about whether he might be going too far into truth about life, aging, and death for today's therapeutic Oprahmatic sensibilities.
The book is packed with goodies, nooks, corners, angles, and spider's webs: all the sorts of things you'd expect to find in a man's shed, in fact. No review, without regurgitating the whole book, could do its scope and curiosity about everything full justice. Some of it is rather profound. Much of it is quirky. It is hardly ever anything less than fascinating. Berkmann talks about the difference between ambition in youth, which is understandable and laudable, if perhaps in some way doomed, and the ambition of middle age, at which point one is 'driven'. But perhaps it is right to be driven still in middle age, since another word for that is 'desiring'. And what is life but desiring? Much later, he writes about parents and our tendency to throw their baggage out, and then to reclaim bits of this and that as we get older. My own feeling about my parents is ambivalent. In some ways I appreciate the freedom they gave me, the lack of nagging; on the other hand, looking back from mature adulthood, I wish they'd pushed me. Not just harder, but at all. We had very little money, but we did have a piano in the house. Why did no one ever sit me down as a small child at the piano? (I have since discovered, in adulthood, a music-writing capability). But I know the answer. They were too busy trying to stay afloat in their own lives.
At one point the author asks, 'Does a gentleman trim his pubic hair?' (p. 38). My spontaneous answer was 'Yes, if his lady does and he wants to match her, stylistically'. The unexpectedness of the book is one of its charms.
The book is seething and teeming with insights, wittily or even hilariously expressed and also clearly representing original thought about the subject matter. There is nothing of the borrowed or much-trodden in the book. Its subject is both researched and known intimately, inside out -- for the author was 50 while writing it: what might be called young middle age. But then again, as he explains, nobody can really agree on which age range qualifies as 'middle'.
There are infelicities, some of which bothered me more than they bother others, I expect. There was too much of the S word and the F word, for one thing. (Does anybody actually say or think 'you bag of f----?' I'm glad to say I've never heard the expression.) His rendering (p. 118) of a 'well-established American campus joke' substitutes 'mother------' at the punchline, which not only doesn't square with the vintage of the joke, but more to the point, puts a sour lemon in your mouth at the precise moment when you should have laughed. I know this because a very eminent American academic told me his version of the joke many years ago. His version wasn't prissy: the last word was 'asshole' (though 'jerk' would have done the job). The 'senior' student of Berkmann's version was a professor in my professor's, and the joke's professor added 'young man' at the end of his comments. Princeton wasn't mentioned. The joke I know comes across as less crass and belligerent. It's how you tell 'em.
It is also curious that none of Berkmann's editors or proofreaders was aware of the difference between 'margherita', which is a style of pizza, and 'margarita', which is a cocktail. So we have this sentence:
When we complete our long years of toil, we shall gain entry to a quiet, prosperous, pastel world of golfing holidays and Caribbean cruises, resting our weary limbs on padded deckchairs while sexually ambiguous serving staff mix our margheritas and massage our aching feet. (p. 53)
The idea of torture as a condign punishment, however unreal the context, appears twice in the book, which to my mind is two times too many. And no, my second thought on seeing rioters on TV is not that it 'looks as though it might be fun' (p. 21). And no, reading the obituary of someone younger than I whose life has been cut short gives me no joy whatsoever (p. 242). Witness the case of Charlotte Furness-Smith, a serving Navy veteran and prep-school math teacher (and a beautiful girl) who drowned recently in a Dorset sea cave. I've thought about it several times with a sense of the waste and the loss, not only to herself but to all that knew or could have known her. But that's reality. Sometimes Berkmann gets carried away with the need to keep a jolly detachment from it.
Still, the man can write, and what's more he gets his teeth right in, without worrying about whether he might be going too far into truth about life, aging, and death for today's therapeutic Oprahmatic sensibilities.
The book is packed with goodies, nooks, corners, angles, and spider's webs: all the sorts of things you'd expect to find in a man's shed, in fact. No review, without regurgitating the whole book, could do its scope and curiosity about everything full justice. Some of it is rather profound. Much of it is quirky. It is hardly ever anything less than fascinating. Berkmann talks about the difference between ambition in youth, which is understandable and laudable, if perhaps in some way doomed, and the ambition of middle age, at which point one is 'driven'. But perhaps it is right to be driven still in middle age, since another word for that is 'desiring'. And what is life but desiring? Much later, he writes about parents and our tendency to throw their baggage out, and then to reclaim bits of this and that as we get older. My own feeling about my parents is ambivalent. In some ways I appreciate the freedom they gave me, the lack of nagging; on the other hand, looking back from mature adulthood, I wish they'd pushed me. Not just harder, but at all. We had very little money, but we did have a piano in the house. Why did no one ever sit me down as a small child at the piano? (I have since discovered, in adulthood, a music-writing capability). But I know the answer. They were too busy trying to stay afloat in their own lives.
At one point the author asks, 'Does a gentleman trim his pubic hair?' (p. 38). My spontaneous answer was 'Yes, if his lady does and he wants to match her, stylistically'. The unexpectedness of the book is one of its charms.
April 6, 2012
I read this in a day and a half! This is exactly how it feels to be a middleaged man told in an intelligent and sometimes dark way by a Times Reporter who knows what he is talking about. I felt so much better for reading this, it is a book that men (of a certain age) should all read (and women who are Maddeningly trying to understand us!) Loved it!
Read
May 10, 2012Berkmann's writing style is funny, witty and accessible. He writes as a man going through mid-life and certain parts of his book made me laugh out loud and though I don't quite yet see myself in this age category I could still identify with large sections of his book... like taking sweaters on holiday and visiting National Trust places!
Read
July 22, 2013I started reading this book to increase my repertoire of p*** taking of the people I believed to be middle aged. However, having finished this book I clearly have at least a toe if not a whole foot through the door of middle agedness!
Very funny and at times painfully close to the bone!
Very funny and at times painfully close to the bone!
June 27, 2013
Speaking as someone now in my mid-forties I don't think of myself as middle aged but after picking up this book on a whim and reading through it voraciously I identify with almost all of it so I guess I have arrived in that much maligned middle age.
This is a very enjoyable and entertaining read, very easy to pick up and read for short bursts. It's split into different experiences or moans as chapters featuring such things as youth, bad manners, litter, swearing, rage, obituaries, parents, leisure and love. There is so much here to laugh at to get angry at, to shout at, to snigger to get upset with an ultimately identify with. I particularly like the authors postscript in that he offers three lessons of middle age:
. We only have one life
. Our main duty to others is to be kind
. Our main duty to ourselves is not to be bored
An enjoyable read and one that made me think a lot. Now that is what I like most about a book....
This is a very enjoyable and entertaining read, very easy to pick up and read for short bursts. It's split into different experiences or moans as chapters featuring such things as youth, bad manners, litter, swearing, rage, obituaries, parents, leisure and love. There is so much here to laugh at to get angry at, to shout at, to snigger to get upset with an ultimately identify with. I particularly like the authors postscript in that he offers three lessons of middle age:
. We only have one life
. Our main duty to others is to be kind
. Our main duty to ourselves is not to be bored
An enjoyable read and one that made me think a lot. Now that is what I like most about a book....
December 22, 2012
This was a very interesting read. I found this book in Waterstones at a time when I was feeling very "middle aged." The title summed up my main ambition in life: to get some peace and quiet!!
Amusingly and honestly written. I recommend this book to all who are, or who feel, middle aged!!
Amusingly and honestly written. I recommend this book to all who are, or who feel, middle aged!!
Read
February 10, 2012I really enjoyed this book - it is funny and thought provoking and I think it will appeal to a much wider audience than 52 year old men like me!! Enjoy!!
May 19, 2012
Great read. I'll be reading this again for sure. A look at the transition to and life in middle age. Very humorous yet filled with poignant truth.
May 23, 2013
Humorous, mock-ranty and worryingly recognisable.
October 14, 2012
Truely supberb book, up there with all his other books. Very funny and profound in places.
April 9, 2016
Caused many long low chuckles! Very thoughtful too. I enjoyed it.
December 9, 2012
self-indulgent protagonist
April 25, 2014
Dull and predictable. I really struggled to bother finishing it!
May 2, 2014
Started off good but became harder as it got nearer to the end!
June 3, 2012
Wishful.
April 23, 2022
Being of a similar age to Marcus Berkmann, I thought that I would relate to this book, although one thing that I did not take into account is that it addresses the male midlife crisis almost exclusively. I guess that I should have anticipated that, but didn't. So, there is a lot about baldness, faking maturity by wearing a suit, pomposity, not going to the dentist (and suffering the consequences), having flings with young women, hairy ears, man-boobs, trains and so on. If it were written for women, it would be losing your husband to a younger woman, menopause, empty nest syndrome, hairy chins and looking after elderly relatives.
However, there is still a lot that I related to and the first half was not just funny, but sometime laugh-out-loud funny! It is a sad fact though that about half-way through the laughs turned into just smiles and eventually the humour seemed to give up the ghost. Perhaps I got used to the direction the funny line was going to turn and so the element of the unexpected - always essential, for me, in humour - was lost. That's not to say that I wasn't enjoying it, just that it did not maintain the high level of fun all the way through.
Ultimately though, I stopped enjoying the book and started to count how many pages there was still to go. It went on a bit too long and, for me, it was almost as though the publisher had said "This is great, but we need about three more chapters". So in addition to "Crumbling" (Chapter 3) we get "Crumbled" (Chapter 16) and a repetition of the stuff about baldness, teeth, ear hair, etc. "Mutton" which is about vanity is followed by "Facelift" - also about vanity and "Youth" followed by "Culture", the second of which is a continuation of the first. Earlier we had "Work" and later we have "Money" and you begin to feel as though we are circulating around the same subjects, hoping that some new insight might soon fall. By the time I got to Chapter 15 ("Whatever") it really felt as though we had begun to scrape the bottom of the barrel and this might be why women finally get a mention at the end of "Crumbled", in order that a few more pages might be filled.
I could have forgiven this and put the book down happy though, if it had not been for the attempt during the final few chapters to try to round the book off with some philosophical thoughts, cliches and homilies. I don't need to be "inspired by reading that Terry Wogan's lesson for life was "Kindness, kindness, kindness" or that "Our main duty to others is to be kind" or "We only have the one life".
Verdict in a nutshell? It is at least 6 chapters too long.
However, there is still a lot that I related to and the first half was not just funny, but sometime laugh-out-loud funny! It is a sad fact though that about half-way through the laughs turned into just smiles and eventually the humour seemed to give up the ghost. Perhaps I got used to the direction the funny line was going to turn and so the element of the unexpected - always essential, for me, in humour - was lost. That's not to say that I wasn't enjoying it, just that it did not maintain the high level of fun all the way through.
Ultimately though, I stopped enjoying the book and started to count how many pages there was still to go. It went on a bit too long and, for me, it was almost as though the publisher had said "This is great, but we need about three more chapters". So in addition to "Crumbling" (Chapter 3) we get "Crumbled" (Chapter 16) and a repetition of the stuff about baldness, teeth, ear hair, etc. "Mutton" which is about vanity is followed by "Facelift" - also about vanity and "Youth" followed by "Culture", the second of which is a continuation of the first. Earlier we had "Work" and later we have "Money" and you begin to feel as though we are circulating around the same subjects, hoping that some new insight might soon fall. By the time I got to Chapter 15 ("Whatever") it really felt as though we had begun to scrape the bottom of the barrel and this might be why women finally get a mention at the end of "Crumbled", in order that a few more pages might be filled.
I could have forgiven this and put the book down happy though, if it had not been for the attempt during the final few chapters to try to round the book off with some philosophical thoughts, cliches and homilies. I don't need to be "inspired by reading that Terry Wogan's lesson for life was "Kindness, kindness, kindness" or that "Our main duty to others is to be kind" or "We only have the one life".
Verdict in a nutshell? It is at least 6 chapters too long.
September 7, 2018
This is quite a different take on the traditional coming of age storey and I really don’t think I would have liked it if I were 10 years younger or older. Found myself thinking ‘we’ll that’s not me, I’m obviously not Middle aged yet’, then next sentence ‘oh yeh, I do that..’
Mostly anarchic, fairly sardonic and at points, a bit of a downer but somehow still made me keep turning pages.
It is bordering on self-indulgent at points but I liked it
Mostly anarchic, fairly sardonic and at points, a bit of a downer but somehow still made me keep turning pages.
It is bordering on self-indulgent at points but I liked it
August 12, 2017
The book stuart heritage will write in a few years and that either he or berkmann could likely have written a few years ago. A few laughs and a few nice observations but a lot of filler
January 26, 2018
Insightful. Poignant. Damn funny.
Read
March 28, 2020Picked up a copy at an Alderney Island Hall Jumble Sale. A funny book for & about men with serious undertones for the honesty of its content, researched through the writer's contemporaries.
May 11, 2020
Thank god! I am normal!
July 17, 2021
Ambition chapter art sports amazing
September 14, 2023
A good overview of the decline of the male species as we age .Amusing and touches on many truths. Worth a read
December 4, 2016
Vintage Berkman even if it does take him well over a hundred pages before he mentions cricket!
These meditations on mid life and aging swing seamlessly between gravitas and humour in equal measure in a way that will have you laughing out loud at the well observed self depreciative anecdotes on one page and then silenced by the all to close to the bone profundity on the next. As a foot note, this is slightly more biased towards the male half of the population.
These meditations on mid life and aging swing seamlessly between gravitas and humour in equal measure in a way that will have you laughing out loud at the well observed self depreciative anecdotes on one page and then silenced by the all to close to the bone profundity on the next. As a foot note, this is slightly more biased towards the male half of the population.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews