When Will We Be Grown?

I will be 47 this year. Who saw that coming? Certainly not me. The last time I checked I was 29. It comes as a shock when friends’ children and also now colleagues were born in the 1990s and now, Lord help us, the 2000s and are legal adults. The baby I once tried to talk down from a weapons grade tantrum in a sub zero car park in snowbound Hamburg is now a grown man. (I ended up shutting him in the boot and letting him sort himself out.) He has a good job now. In random work meetings I find myself admiring the skin of the more youthful participants, like some sort of skulking cannibal bookbinder.

Equally, as the last vestiges of youth slip away and while I am free of cellulite thanks to a lucky accident of genetics, a good night’s sleep means a face like a trodden-in Pukka Pie until at least noon.

All that said, I like being in my forties. I am very far from working out life’s mysteries, but things that would have once fazed me before are now doable. Did anyone die? is my opening gambit. If no one has died, we can fix anything. We have seen our fair share of life’s emergencies and sadness (no more, thank you, for now). The things that set me off kilter now are not the big things, but the small ones. Last week I was in the supermarket and received a text message to say we owed £404 for something. I got into the car thinking, well this is extremely unlikely, and messaged Mr I who said DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK. But I almost did. It’s easy to be fooled.

This pervading anxiety is a reflection of how we live now. Worrying about missing something off a tax return, hours spent on hold for car insurance quotes; wondering if you have enough time to eat the bananas before they go off. And I don’t even like bananas but apparently they are good for you. That’s all before what the Taliban is up to lately and has everyone in the house taken their medication? Not those ones, those ones! News and views and the remorseless onslaught of adulting compete to make us afraid of the world. Everything is terrible. Random text messages in the supermarket are designed to send you into a flat spin.

The weird thing is, that everything isn’t terrible. Glimpses of light and hope pervade. This morning I woke early. (Bonus 1: I woke up.) Mr I was sleeping soundly (Bonus 2), and WH was dreaming at the end of the bed, whiffling away (In the Plus/Minus Bonus category: she’s so noisy). As I woke up to another day of merciless adulting, I thought two things, the first being not again, and the second, it could be worse.