Why every man like me needs a midlife MOT

Feeling sluggish, wondering where all your friends have gone and why your libido has disappeared? It’s more complicated than testosterone levels dipping, discovers Nick Harding, who checks out what’s really going on...

Nick Harding found that exercise, including cycling, helps prevent many problems that middle-aged men think are inevitable (Nick Harding )

The epiphany occurred at Vue Cinema in Portsmouth, in the middle of The Super Mario Bros Movie. I was there with my 21-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son (there was nothing else on, OK), and it dawned on me that Mario was a metaphor for middle-aged males like myself. There he is, clunking through a rigged system, dodging hazards, on a quest for what? Just when he thinks he’s triumphed, victory is snatched away, and the whole game begins again.

This is where I am. Fifty-plus years in, much luckier than some, but still plugging away. The barrels and fireballs I dodged in the video games of my youth are now to be found in a real-life “sniper alley” – financial instability, obesity, hair loss, and the nagging worry that the movie is in its closing scenes and the plot hasn’t worked out quite as I hoped.

This low-level existential malaise is not uncommon among my peers – we are more likely than women to struggle with our health, to suffer from loneliness, and to attempt suicide. A 2018 study by the National Institute for Health and Care Research concluded that by 2035, two-thirds of us aged over 65 will be living with multiple health conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, cancer and heart disease.