Dozy Writes

My recent endeavours with launching a website and promoting it through social media have prompted a terrifying realisation: I’ve become old!

In actual fact, this feeling of getting older has popped up fairly frequently over the last few years but now it’s started to slap me around the face like the infamous advert for Orange Tango.

The realisation started gradually with a couple of classic middle aged moments a few years ago, the first of which was the issue of not having long enough arms to read cooking instructions and suchlike. Despite my protestations that it was a bad light and they were making the writing smaller and smaller, it seemed that I actually needed reading glasses. 

The second moment was when I met a police detective through my work and had to bite my tongue to stop myself asking, “Does your mum know you’re out alone, son?” I’d heard about this mythical event where you become old the moment you think that police officers look like they should still be in school but it was a shock to realise it had happened to me.

Nevertheless, I continued on my merry way, not really believing that I was getting older until the next sign appeared. A few years back, I had bought tickets for A.P and I to go to a Dia De Los Muertos event. It was billed as a carnival type gig with a skull parade, burlesque performers and face painters. Oh how I loved the idea of getting a sugar skull painted on my face!

I’d bought the tickets a few months in advance because I was so keen to go but I didn’t receive the full details until the week before. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the event didn’t actually start until 10 pm? What the heck? At 10 pm I’m winding down for the night. I mean, it’s not like I’m a granny going to my bed at 9 pm but let’s be clear, I have no intention of putting my bra back on to head out for a session after 10 o’clock at night. And, by the way, this event was due to go on until 4 am!

I desperately tried to get rid of the tickets but no-one wanted them, in fact there was an alarming number of people also trying to get rid of their tickets, presumably other folk in their 40s who didn’t want the sleep hangover that comes with a 4 am finish.

Speaking of 4 am finishes and sleep hangovers, my pal and I had a crazy night last year where we sat and drank tea and watched YouTube videos. We got caught in a rabbit hole of videos, reminiscing about songs from our youth and before we knew it, it was 4 am. The next day, we had to go and get ourselves a carb-loaded lunch because we felt as if we had a hangover.

Two weeks later, I said I was feeling tired and he replied, “You know why we’re so tired? Because we stayed up until 4 am two weeks ago!” I wish it was a joke but it was sadly all too true.

I experienced another milestone moment when I was around some teenagers at a hip hop dance event last year. I have friends who are dancers so I often go to these events to support them. Naturally, I am invisible to teenagers most of the time because most people are invisible to teenagers, it’s part of the experience of being a teenager. However, I became visible to them at this event last year which was held at the Scoop in London, an open air amphitheatre near London Bridge.

It was raining heavily so I decided to pop to the shop to buy some bin bags so I wouldn’t get a wet arse from sitting on the steps (yes, I know this act in itself is a milestone ageing moment but there’s more to come). I was with my younger pal who is a popper which you might know better as body popping (I’ve included a link to the definition of this for the older readers). As soon as the teenagers noticed that we were sitting on bin bags they rushed over, begging for a bag to use to protect themselves. Obviously these requests were directed at my pal who they knew from the dance scene, I was still quite invisible. My pal told them that I was in charge of the bags and they needed to ask me instead and, Ta-dah, suddenly they saw me.

I realised exactly how they saw me when they swiftly changed their language, their requests becoming ultra polite, their tone pleading and accompanied by puppy eyes. The street smart cockiness which had been evident moments before had vanished and they had become respectful. Quite simply, they saw me as an old woman. It was good to receive some respect but it was also a bit galling to be seen as old.

Still on the subject of teenagers, I find myself in the bewildering position of no longer having a grasp of their cultural references and I often wonder if we’re speaking the same language, so different is the way that they speak.

To be fair, I remember it being the same when I was a teenager where I felt a disconnect with anyone over the age of 25. I can recall my pals and I having our own language as teenagers. We used to quote the character Delbert Wilkins from the Lenny Henry Show. Our particular favourite was using the word “crucial” to describe anything we thought was good. I remember one time describing something to my mam and telling her it was crucial. She looked confused and then explained that I wasn’t using the word correctly. I just shook my head in teenage frustration. 

Another time in my teens, I had the cassette single of Vanilla Ice’s classic hit, Ice Ice Baby, playing in the car and there was a bit of record scratching on the second song. I watched in fascination as my dad rushed to eject the tape thinking that the player was mangling it. He’d never heard record scratching before because he was more of a Johnny Cash man. Regardless, it was another moment where I shook my head in teenage frustration, thinking that my parents were so ancient. 

A quick note for any younger readers: you may not have experienced the horror of your favourite music cassette tape getting mangled in a player but it was a worrying event that resulted in you having to carefully wind the tape back into the cassette, desperately hoping it hadn’t been warped so much that it would distort the sound. Playing music was a much more hazardous activity back then. Thankfully, you don’t have to wind up a digital music file.

This brings me back to my most recent realisation which occurred when I was engaging with technology. Now, I am not someone who is generally bad with technology. In my last job I managed the data side of Human Resources, I was adept at understanding IT systems and updating web pages amongst other techie things. I even did some xml coding which is more exciting than it sounds (or maybe that’s just me). But I did all of that not because I loved technology but because I loved what it could do for me in the workplace. I loved the efficiency of it all.

I haven’t felt as excited about social media, particularly in recent years, perhaps in part because I spent so much time answering messages and emails in my job that I didn’t really feel like doing more of the same in my free time. 

However, as you may already know, I do love a voice note because I can speak quicker than I can type, especially when it comes to touch screens. Once I learned that you didn’t need to hold down the mic button constantly on WhatsApp, I was raring to go.

I thought I understood everything about voice notes and went to send a reply to another dance pal of mine on Instagram but I was overconfident and somehow ended up video calling him by mistake because I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I had to act quickly and stab at the screen repeatedly to end the call whilst frustratingly muttering, “Make it stop, how do I make it stop?”

My further attempts to record voice notes on Instagram were thwarted by the realisation that I was restricted to one minute at a time. It took some time before I realised my message had stopped recording even though I was still speaking. It was all getting rather stressful and there were a lot of deleted voice notes before I eventually managed to reply, much to my pal’s amusement.

These weren’t my only issues to overcome, I had no idea how to navigate my way through Instagram stories until my nieces showed me how and I have absolutely no idea how Snapchat or TikTok work.

My questionable relationship with social media apps didn’t bode well for me trying to share my writing with everyone. My search history is littered with questions such as “Can you add a clickable link to Instagram?” and “How do I share a post on LinkedIn?”.

Thank goodness for Google, the (mostly) dependable source to which I can direct my many queries. However, even Google can’t help me whenever I try to prove that I am not a robot. I start clicking on all of the images of a crosswalk even though I’m not entirely sure what it looks like because I’m from the UK. I peer at the images, unable to make out whether a particular square might actually feature the corner of a crosswalk. I have only ever managed to proceed past this test once without having to be reissued a further grid of images. I thought that my old reading glasses were to blame but even with a new prescription I’m still peering, still swearing and still being issued with further grids to keep proving I’m not a robot. I have a theory that perhaps it’s only robots that can manage to fill out the blooming things.

As much as the robot exercise drives me mad, the biggest and most frustrating issue I encounter with modern technology is the scanning of my fingerprint. I receive the message “Fingerprint doesn’t match” countless times on a daily basis. I’m not sure if the skin on my fingers is becoming thinner with age but I seem to have the smoothest fingertips in the world and as a result I rarely provide a recognisable fingerprint scan. This may be good if I want to commit a crime but I actually only want to access my banking app to view my bank account. 

These milestones in ageing have given me a better understanding of the confusion and frustrations that previous generations have experienced. I feel a sense of solidarity with them that was missing before. I want to shake my head and tut in annoyance even though there’s a part of me that can’t believe this is happening to me.

The truth is that as much as we all think that we’re never going to get older, we do. 

Despite feeling the passing of time with these key moments, I am not completely despondent about getting older. There are many aspects about growing older that I enjoy such as being less concerned about how others view me, being more comfortable with who I am and being open to allowing myself to change and evolve. 

It is also helpful to keep the ageing process in perspective, as demonstrated by this great quote:

Do not complain about getting old. It is a privilege denied to many. ~ Mark Twain

For me, this is a really important lesson to remember.  We may be getting older but we’re alive and that’s generally considered to be a better option than the alternative. Just because we don’t want to go out at 10 o’clock at night doesn’t mean that we have to become miserable old farts. We don’t need to be partying to stay young but our outlook can make a difference.

We can embrace the ageing process and make the most of it, especially the part about being less concerned about what others think. Young children don’t worry about what others think until we teach them to do so. Their enthusiasm and wonder at the world and their willingness to laugh is infectious. I saw this quote which may or may not be true: 

Six year olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15-100 times a day. Be six again. ~ Unknown / tinybuddha.com

Maybe we should laugh as if we are six again, so, in the spirit of enjoying ourselves and laughing more, I would like to encourage you to share your experiences of hitting some ageing milestones.

After all, they say that laughter is the best medicine and let’s be honest, we need something for those aching joints!