You know when you’re getting old when…

For many years I’ve known that adulthood has been bearing down on me like a persistent, unrelenting bull (great analogy – I’m sticking with it). Friends have got married, friends have had babies and friends have sent their kids to secondary school whilst I’ve been languishing in a post adolescent quagmire switching careers and playing Call of Duty. Like some London dwelling, media working Peter Pan who looks like Kenneth Brannagh and still dresses like nu metal is en vogue. It’s not that I’ve been actively resisting maturity, quite the opposite in fact, I’ve only been doing what has seemed perfectly natural to me. It would be insincere if I suddenly wore cardigans, read The Times and bought an Adele album just to blend in with the other, better adjusted, 30 somethings. Nosiree. That ruse would never hold water.

However despite this there have been a few occasions where I’ve taken a long hard look at myself and thought ‘Christ I’m getting on.’ I mean, the last thing I want to become is the 50-year-old male of equivalent Cher. Wearing skinny jeans to Morrison’s every Sunday.

1) The first warning, like the proverbial canary in a mine, was when at the age of 29 I volunteered to build schools in Borneo with a team of 12 precocious British teenagers who, to a man, had never heard of The A-Team. Which was awkward because my catch phrase for the project was ‘I love it when the plan comes together.’ (Genius.)

I said it everytime we had finished constructing a wall or something and took their semi enthusiastic smiles as recognition that I was some comic genius but no, it transpired that they just thought I was odd. They were just smiles to appease the over enthusiastic Project Manager…

Kids these days.

2) The other thing that has begun to haunt me, like a ghost bull (I’m on fire today!) was that when I looked in shop windows or stared out of the bus window the most prominent feature on my face, that always leapt out at me, were the frown marks on my forehead which look thicker and more prominent than my rather slender lips of infamy.

I’ve subsequently been starring at co-workers older than me and theirs aren’t as pronounced – probably because it’s me who has to put up with them, but still, they’re here to stay. PERMANENT. Can’t file that under ‘cultural misunderstanding.’

3) The most damning episode though, which renders the above almost meaningless (less than meaningless?) was my recent trip to Game to purchase Battlefield 3. The shop assistant asked if I had a reward card (I did) and we had to spend five minutes going through every one of my previous addresses until I reached the one I opened the card with – which ended up being my uni digs at Gladstone Terrace in 2002. Oh how we laughed as we kept going back and back and back through my life.

Then, without any prompting, and without really thinking, I said to the lady/girl/small child (she was probably 18 or something):

“Do you know my rent then was £30 a week back then?”

To which her only response was to nod meekly and say, rather unconvincingly, ‘oh… wow.’

I didn’t even say it in an old dishevelled voice. I really thought it was interesting (C’mon house prices! Who doesn’t love stories about rent?) and suddenly I’m just standing there being another  old prat making young people feeling awkward. I might as well tell her about dial-up broadband or the Black-fucking-Plague.

It was a really low point. An out-of-body experience where I could look down on myself and shake my head in pity.

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