Once a week, crisis or no crisis, walking past 17 Heriot Row, the childhood home of Robert Louis Stevenson, I like to offer a respectful nod in the direction of the red front door. You can picture the face of a young boy looking out from an upper bedroom window over to the pond in Queen Street gardens, thoughts of high seas and yo-ho-ho’s and x-marks-the-spot whirling in his mind. I first encountered Treasure Island as an eleven-year old at a boarding school for the partially sighted where Mr Marcantonio would read us a chapter each morning before assembly. The only crisis then was having to wait for the next instalment.

My midlife crisis wasn’t entirely wasted but I could have done without the morbid neurosis which would creep up on me in the early hours and most frequently in my 47th year. This catastrophising manifested itself mostly in thoughts of being diagnosed with an incurable disease or becoming a road accident statistic. Say if a 10 tonne truck sped through a red light at the bottom of Restalrig Road as we were crossing but, rather than killing the both of us as per the Morrissey lyric, you jumped out of the way in time – and the pleasure and the privilege really was all mine. I mean, good for you, but I’m hedgehogged in the middle of the road.

Crisis, what crisis? (A Labour Prime Minister never said this but it didn’t get in the way of a good headline.) When not preoccupied with existential dread I also decided in the early 2010’s that I was a poet. I loved poetry, still do – the bawdiness and brilliance of Burns, the luminescence and feline grace of Stevie Smith, the Dada and ha-ha of Adrian Mitchell – and would regularly spend my lunch hour in the Scottish Poetry Library. Who needs a sandwich when you can consume the whole history of humanity from Sapho to Seamus Heaney? As for poets though, or at least those wannabe’s on the Edinburgh spoken word scene of a decade ago, what can I say? There were more than a few whose penchant for iambic pentameter was less obvious than their bandwagon politics and preposterous self-regard.

Harsh? I’ll lend you a time machine so you can zip back to the Blind Poet pub on a Monday night in 2012 to see for yourself. Okay, the beardy fella ranting about the size of his gastro pub burger is quite funny but that middle-aged bloke trying to be Kerouac-like in his riffing and throwing in puns and pop culture references like he’s a recovering music journalist or…oh, that’s me. Please make him stop.

As I edge closer to the age of three score – and no need for the ten just yet – I think of previous big birthdays and the extent of the crisis that accompanied each. At 21 I’m to be found dripping wet and walking down St Aldates in Oxford, having been punting with school pals and my girlfriend, pink Damned t-shirt and drainpipe jeans clinging to me. My worries? What shall I be? Do people like me? Who even am I? At 30 I’m going to register for the Edinburgh Film Festival as an accredited journalist, a good feeling until I spy Mark Cousins in front of me, bounding up the stairs all Tigger-like in his designer suit and Michael Stipe olive and black star t-shirt. He gets hugs and air kisses from those behind the desk while I receive a sceptical and-you-are…? I leave to review a mid-morning show at the Fringe and write it up afterwards in the Jolly Judge over a gin ‘n’ tonic. What flavour gin, sir? Do you have anything rasberryish with notes of melancholy and an aftertaste of status anxiety?

At 40 I’m more relaxed and other than playing Toxic by Britney Spears at the wrong speed (a very John Peel thing to do my friend John says), things go well and I end the night wearing a gold cape. No sign of the blues here. For 50 there’s little material about which to write a country song but again I hog the record decks and tell a few friends what I shouldn’t tell them, you know, about where the treasure’s buried.

But to borrow from RLS: we must go on, because we can’t turn back.