Three Men On Tour: 1

When do you grow up? I don’t mean your first car, or your first job, or the first time you have sex. You can do all of those without being grown up at all. I mean when do you start calling yourself an adult inside your own head?

I don’t feel like an adult. I feel like I’ve put on my father’s oversized coat and shoes and I’m clomping through the house telling everyone to call me Mr. Chapman. I’ve been shaving for years now and I still stop half way through so I can look at my little half beard and pretend that I’m Iron Man. Or Johnny Depp. It doesn’t matter. I shave it off before anyone sees me anyway.

I remember my father telling me about a school reunion. He was walking through the grounds, trying to pluck up the courage to go in and admit to everything he hadn’t achieved over the last 30 years, when he saw an old man striding towards him who he assumed was the groundsman. My father prepared his apologies, trying to remember if he had passed any ‘no entry’ signs or trodden on any illegal blades of grass. Then, like a magic eye picture, the features in front of him fell in place and he found himself looking at the face of a boy he had last seen at 17, fresh faced and trying to sneak into the house drunk without getting caught.

What was scariest, my father told me afterwards, was that as those features fell into place, as the face of an old man changed into an old friend, he knew that his friend had been thinking the same thing: who is this decrepit old man and is he about to tell me off for being naughty? Finding out that my father never really grew up had a profound effect. It also explained why he had asked for an XBox for his previous birthday. But I began wondering: what about me? Do I look like an adult from a distance? Now that I have a job, and a girlfriend, and the beginnings of a receding hair-line, do people see me and think ‘he must be mature, he must be responsible, he must be respectable’? Do I look like a grown up?

Because I’m not.