AINE O’CONNOR

Old enough to not blame it on the boogie

Unquestionably, one of the very best benefits of getting older is that you have far fewer fecks to give. What other people think, of you, or possibly anything, feels infinitely less important than it did when you were 20. It’s a great liberation.

Presumably it’s in part to do with confidence but it’s largely to do too with knowing that very little really matters. So if someone doesn’t like your hair or gets humpy over something you said, well, that’s unfortunate but not hugely important. Roughly 90pc of what people say or do to you is about them anyway so bar allowing or not allowing bad behaviour there is not a vast amount to be done about other people. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t great finding out you had your skirt tucked into your tights half the day or falling down steps or waving frantically at someone you thought was someone else or farting loudly but while at 20 these things would have made you put yourself under house arrest, at older you can move on from them with more ease.

Weirdly though one of the things that never ever stops being embarrassing is when you get busted dancing alone in the kitchen. Whether blasting out the tunes or in your own private headphone tune land there is something endlessly morto about getting caught shimmying with a spatula.

I am happy to confess to domestic dancing but on the occasions when people have caught me I feel really busted and instantly attempt to make it look like I was doing something else. However, the possible alternatives for doing YMCA in the middle of the kitchen floor are quite limited and you just look like an even bigger spanner. All I can hope is that more birthdays will bring great freedom to boogie.