How you Know your Middle-Aged!
A Steady Middle-Age
I haven’t had much to blog about lately as October has been a fairly steady month. and I’ve felt pretty ordinary and dare I say, middle-aged. I’ve corrected myself when using middle-aged derogatively but … life has been pleasant but uneventful. I’ve been back in the UK for most of it, hanging out with my oldies, trying not to visit Betsy who is settling into university in York too often and refraining from texting her and Annie (in Spain) more than five or six times a day. The hiighlight for my middle-aged existence has been having my lovely Saint Mick of Thana here for half term. He had a great time but I think was a little perturbed at the large list of middle-aged ‘jobs’ that I had lined up for him. (No expat life of maids and helpers back in the UK!). He even managed to find time to get new LED lights fitted to ‘our’ old Land Rover Defender while he was here so that “you won’t have to drive home from visiting Betsy with poor lights!” Hmm.
We’ve been getting a kitchen makeover completed so there were trips to the local dump along with the regular grass cutting, and other ‘boy jobs’. for Mick to do. Yes, I know that is sexist. but nevertheless the tasks needed completing. (It is probably fair to say that my whole family hate my lists of jobs, but it has never stopped me writng them!)
Anyway, the Howdens kitchen is finally finished and looks great. (I should thank Terry McKitten the best joiner in England, Martin Barr, a wonderful electrician (so good that I have now got him working in the bathroom!) and Ann Clement and Matteo Hilldrith for a lovely kitchen design..) As the final piece of flooring was laid and the dishwasher started its first cycle, my level of excitement at a job well done made me think the term middle-aged really did apply to me. I’m not so sure young people get as excited as I did by new splashbacks! Not to worry I’m middle-aged and proud!
Anyway, what with one thing and another I’ve started thinking a bit more about being middle aged and have realised there are other middle-aged give-aways too! Do they apply to you?
They are not the best pics but before and after along with the reluctant kitchen model Terry!
20 Ways you Know You're Middle-Aged
- You spend Halloween worrying about your children celebrating in nightclubs instead of worrying they are eating too much sugar or might not be able to bob for apples successfully.
- You are genuinely excited by new beige kitchen spalshbacks.
- You joined Zammo and Nancy Reagan in the ‘Just Say No’ anti-drugs campaign.
- You can afford lovely pillows.
- You are sufficiently aware of household expenditure to preserve the longevitiy of your pillows by using two pillow cases.
- You remember when Labour was a popular party. These days I am very ambivalent about party politics.
- You use terms like ‘these days’.
- You cannot stand without emitting a noise somewhere between a sigh and a grunt.
- You don’t like to draw attention to yourself when driving your lovely Porsche Boxter (s) as its ownership suggests that you are in the midst of a mid-life crisis!
- You just about remember the UK joining Europe.
- Going shopping meant travelling to a town’s high street, not going to an out of town shopping complex.
- You used to watch a black and white TV with a fuzzy picture in bed and only had three channels to choose from.
- You always had a roast dinner on Sundays.
- Fizzy pop was a treat.
- You remember watching Crossroads.
- If someone talks about the ‘Royal Wedding’ you initially assume they mean that of Charles and Diana.
- You were allowed to have a crush on Prince Andrew because …
- You mocked Japanese reality shows for making the contestants eat bugs etc and was certain it would never happen in the UK. The notion of ‘Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ would have been absurd.
- Authors writing specifically for teens were in short supply and so you read Daniella Steele and Lace when you were much too young!
- You fought your siblings to use the phone which was housed at the bottom of the stairs. You blamed your sibling when the BT bill was too high.
Middle-Age and Technology Blunders!
I should stop at 20, though actually I lost the first draft of this post. Messing up technology being another factor of being middle-aged. Ironically I couldn’t remember many of my first twenty indicators of middle-agedness though poor memory ought to have been one of them, but I had no problem thinking of others. It is fair to say they jumped into my mind in a sprightly youthful manner. Who’d have thought it!