Believe it or not, Idris Elba, you can have new experiences well beyond your fifties

Idris Elba, an actor whom US magazine People has deemed the Sexiest Man Alive, is nevertheless having a bit of a new year crisis. “I’m losing my youth, I’m facing 50,” he has wailed (he’s 47 this year), and apparently that means doors slamming everywhere and a major mid-life moment.

“It’s not like you can make new experiences so much, because you’ve probably covered it all.” What? Tell that to the skydiving grandfathers, the marathon-running septuagenarians, the debut novelists who also hold a free bus pass.

To see someone who is frankly only halfway through his Hollywood career and the Marvel franchise, suggesting that all is left is dross and reruns is not only risible, given the appetite for ageing stars in superhero films these days (see Anthony Hopkins, Ian Mckellen, Patrick Stewart et al), but depressing. Idris, me old mucker, it’s not true! You definitely have not “covered it all” by the age of 47, unless you only ever wanted to be a treble in the choir, a Premier League striker or an Olympic gymnast.

Earlier this year I had a brain tumour removed from behind my eye. It was big, benign but brutal, and it had to go. The resultant operation was a success; the tumour was all but completely removed and I am fine. But in the months before the op, the tumour was not alone in my brain.

Fear was right beside it, all the time. I thought I was going to die. I worked out tunes for my funeral. I also found myself doing a sort of mental checklist. I wanted to know whether at the age of 53, I had done everything I wanted to do.

Yep, I had written those novels. Yep, I had been a reporter on the BBC, a columnist in the broadsheets, a mother, a runner, yada yada yada. But was it enough? Had I, as Elba suggests, “covered it all”? I realised that of course I hadn’t. I want to have many more new experiences in my working life. What sort of example is it to millennials, a group whom we advise must prepare for having at least six careers, if we middle-aged people give up having new experiences by the time we are 47?

What are you talking about? I became Chair of Hull City of Culture at the youthful age of 49. Had I ever chaired anything before? Nope. Was I terrified? Yes. It all worked out quite well, however. Last year, at 52, I became a CEO for the first time.

Without wishing to be sanctimonious about it, these days the need for career reinvention is acute. Jobs change, work demands alter and before you know it, your once-robust work stream has gone with the digital wind, and you have to start addressing that hideous thing known as a “skill set”. There is no point thinking, a la Elba, “whoops, I am over 45, better not think about doing anything new, because I have covered it all”.

From what I hear anyway, he hasn’t. I mean, Idris, have you quaffed a martini in a tux and seduced a babe before gunning down the villain? Come on, now. Playing 007, the part you have been tipped to take over for at least a decade, is a whole new ball game.

Millennials, or anyone heading for their fifties, do not listen to this counsel of despair. Otherwise you might well be saying mournfully “Able was I ere I saw Elba”. And yes, I have waited for about 30 years to put that palindrome into a column.