Last Saturday, I found myself in a cinema watching The Reader. It's a searing and profound study of the guilt of a generation. Or so they tell me. After the first half of the film, my brain turned to mush. I just couldn't take anything in. Ralph Fiennes looked glum. Why? It was something to do with Nazis. Or was it? Ralph Fiennes often looks glum. Kate Winslet wept in a church. I think she was experiencing shame. She'd been a concentration camp guard. Wasn't that it? Her greater shame, though, was illiteracy. No, that can't be right. Illiterates have never been responsible for genocide. (Frankly, they can't even spell it.) Wait a minute, I know why she was crying. She was in a church, and in a church you're not allowed to take off your clothes.
As you can tell, my brain never recovered from the sex. Basically, the first half of The Reader is sex and the second is historical insights. Sorry, that just doesn't work for me. I can't be expected, at 55, to gaze for half an hour at a naked Kate Winslet and then be cerebral. That sex with Kate Winslet stuff is too weird, too unsettling, too unlike anything that happens at home. Yes, yes, I know she's a national treasure. But so's David Attenborough. And Attenborough's buttocks don't follow you round the room. Dammit, if I shut my eyes, I can still see them now. (Kate Winslet's, that is.) They were brilliant. Fantastic. They should have got an Oscar. Best Buttocks. I have to lie down.
As we left the cinema, my wife was seething. Unlike me, she'd understood everything but been convinced by nothing. "And it wasn't even erotic," she complained. "Oh, I don't know," I replied. "I found a lot of it quite sexy."
"Really?" she said. Those blasted buttocks - it's the last time I'll mention them - caused me nothing but trouble.
The Reader took me back to being a 14-year-old, nervously approaching a cinema cashier to buy a ticket for a Swedish sex film. (In my youth, for some reason, only Swedes had sex. Britons just had embarrassment.) Society had decreed I was too immature to see it. But I wasn't too immature to try. Breezily, I fingered the sparse brown grass of my nascent moustache. I tossed and caught my packet of 10 Player's No 6. "One, please," I said to the cashier, in my casual, deep voice - the one I'd broken earlier. Then I braced myself for humiliation: "Sorry, you're too young."
That's what I wish had happened when I went to see The Reader. Except, of course, the cashier would have said I was too old. The film has a 15 certificate. But that's a minimum. Where's the maximum? Old people need restraining too. They need to be kept away from stuff they're too mature to see. The cashier should have asked my age and then said: "Sorry. You can't come in. The film's a 54."
At least, in a cinema, we old guys are protected by the dark.
Just a few days before, I went with my wife and teenage daughter to see some bands. That's right. Bands. Groups. Pop combos. Glasvegas, Friendly Fires, White Lies and Florence and the Machine. Clearly visible in the auditorium were several men of my age, all breathing excitedly through their grey nostril hairs. Good on us. We were attending a concert of new music, as opposed to a Led Zep reunion.
Mercifully, nothing about the music was erotic. But nor, to my ears, was any of it new. Everything about White Lies sounded familiar. I heard an echo of Echo and the Bunnymen, a splash of The Teardrop Explodes and - dear oh dear - a joyless revision of Joy Division. My lip started quivering. I became arch. White Lies could not compare to the old masters they so wilfully plundered. I stood there, turning into rock's Brian Sewell. It was agony.
I don't want to be a grumpy old man any more than a dirty old one. Where was the parental advisory sticker? It should have been on my ticket. Parents Are Advised Not To Buy This Ticket.
I have limited time left on this earth. Pass me my unread copy of Middlemarch and lock the damn door.
• Jon Canter is the author of A Short Gentleman jcanter@waitrose.com
