I am officially a podcast addict, to the point that I now rarely do any household task without being plugged into one. I think there’s probably a whole thesis to be written on how little my generation can tolerate silence these days, but that’s not the point of today’s email. Instead I want to talk about the ZOE podcast on ageing, which included a fascinating interview with Professor Rose Anne Kenny.
Having spent years researching the experience of ageing in Ireland, her findings include the massive impact of socialising on ageing (in summary: don’t let your friendships slide) and the scary fact that the fitness levels of 38-year-olds can predict how well they’ll age, which means I have three years post-baby to sort my sh*t out.
One thing I found really interesting was her assertion that the classic cliché ‘you’re only as old as you feel’ is in fact true. In Prof Kenny’s research, those who refused to believe the number of candles on the birthday could possibly be right actually aged more slowly than those that did.
This is good news for me, as I often feel I’m trapped in a sort of Peter Pan mindset. Take parenting, for example. Despite having been a mother for nearly four years, I often still look at my daughter and think: I cannot believe I, a virtual child myself, am considered grown-up enough to be left alone in charge of another kid. Shouldn’t my mum be here to supervise or something?
There’s also my living situation. My husband and I have visited literally every commutable town within a one-hour circumference of London, and yet still we cannot bring ourselves to do the eminently sensible thing that everyone else in their thirties does: sell up their London flat (if lucky enough to own one) and move out to a proper house in the suburbs. I blame this largely on my fear of boring Sundays in small towns - something I had a lot of experience of growing up - but also some scary sense that once I choose a place to settle down for good I am also giving up on that ‘anything could happen’ optimism that makes your twenties so exciting (and unnerving).
Sometimes on a Friday night I’ll walk past my local pub, which turns into a nightclub after 10pm, and think it’s only a matter of time before I rejoin the noisy, giddy queue of people outside. In my head, this ‘being pregnant/parenting small children’ phase of my life is just a little break from my fun and fabulous years, which I will return to once the business of raising tiny people has been attended to. I can’t decide whether this is a delusional unwillingness to accept my own age, or a positive belief that even your middle years can still be as exhilarating as the younger ones. Either way, according to Prof Kenny, it’s not entirely a bad thing.
This Peter Pan considers herself vindicated.
May I suggest Hemel Hempstead?