NEW AGE MAIL

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Please stop asking me to get in touch with my feelings. I got in touch with my feelings once and it was icky. I was in a supermarket at the time and I cried all over the fennel pollen. People thought I was having a Martyrchef moment..."no Tarquin that's fine, you just sit there and watch the tennis while I dust the pickled antelope forelock with fennel pollen, no no, you just relax, I'll strain the jus, it's not like I've had to take a second job to pay our saffron bill at the Provedore, I mean I just lounge around here all day while you're at your great big important job at SBS"... I'm sorry I have no idea where that came from, yet again it highlights the very real dangers of feelings and trying to get in touch with them. I remember the time I tried to do it on Facebook - I put in a friend request to my emotions & it was just ignored. I have no idea how I feel about that. Emotions are overrated, I'd rather have Euros. When I was growing we had bugger all to do with emotions, we couldn't afford them. A couple of my friends had some, but they were rich. We just ate our sticks and dirt for breakfast and got on with it.

Someone told me I should get in touch with my inner child. Please. I'm an older man, my inner child is thirty-two, doesn't shave and has no job. Doesn't even bother to hide the bong when I visit. I absolutely refuse to embrace him until he puts on a clean t-shirt, and the only thing I have ever learnt from him is that a repeat of M*A*S*H is on every seventeen minutes somewhere in the world. And I'm pretty sure I had a vague idea about that anyway. He tells me he has 'abandonment issues'. I told him to fuck off.

And since you ask, no I do not have children of my own. If I wish to replicate the emotional experience, I simply get on a tram, find someone in their mid-twenties, sit down and apologise profusely for everything I've ever done, beg their forgiveness for having fucked up their lives, and give them all the money in my wallet while mumbling resentfully about never seeing the grand-children. It's got everything - awkwardness, embarrassment, guilt, and expense. So close to the real thing.

Friends say to me at my age I should be growing emotionally and assessing my feelings in order to avoid the catastrophic effects of the inevitable mid-life crisis. This is crap. These days you can do it all online. Just the other day I was emailed the official mid-life crisis pack. It offers choices (a) blonde mistress with big tits,(b) vintage Ferrari, or (c) red shoes. My wife said I could have the red shoes. Fair enough. I could never afford the insurance premiums on a mistress.

And as my close personal friend Yul Brunner once said to me: "We can stand around here all day discussing feelings, or we can get this pyramid built. Up to you"