Getting old and owning it
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11 20-21 Labour weekend:
Great getaway ideas to maximise our hard-earned break.
Gisborne:
Head there next weekend to kick off the wine season in style.
Queenstown:
The big adventure town... no jetboat ride or bungy jump needed.
22-23 God only knows:
What Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s endured: an extract from his harrowing autobiography.
24-25 Stand up:
Our long tradition of protest in the frame.
Jonathan Safran Foer:
Gen X novelist’s latest is all about parenthood.
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Here in Aotearoa, there are myriad getaway options for long weekends. iStock
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The evidence is irrefutable. I’m suffering from selfdiagnosed early-onset fuddy-duddyitis. Despite what the glossy magazines and wellness bloggers would have women of a certain vintage believe, 40 isn’t the new 30 after all. It’s the new 50.
Nothing makes you feel enfeebled quite like the enthusiastic company of youth, and this week my husband and I are hosting a couple of Belgian twentysomethings, Hanne and Wouter, who are in New Zealand on a working holiday.
It doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was the one travelling the world, wide-eyed and carefree (credit card balance aside), dossing on the couches of middleaged horticultural hippies; now it appears I’m the hippie accommodating bright young things almost half my age. How did that happen?
On Tuesday, Hanne celebrated her 25th birthday. We marked the occasion with champagne, strawberries and that worldfamous (except in Belgium, apparently) symbol of Kiwi cuisine, a store-bought pavlova. I can’t even remember what I did on my 25th birthday, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t demonstrating any of these symptoms of premature pensioner status:
I start so many conversations with, ‘‘When I was your age …’’ This is usually technology related, as in, ‘‘When I was your age, there was no Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr or Tinder’’. When I was 25, faxes were still considered newfandangled and cellphones had only one function: calling.
Whereas 10 years ago, I thought nothing of splurging half my weekly salary on a pair of True Religion designer jeans with white top-stitching and diamantes embedded in my back pockets, this month I bought a $50 pair of jeans at Farmers. They’re rather comfortable, I must say, even if they did shrink two inches in their first hot wash.
I offer the same curmudgeonly advice to any young woman considering the conventional norms of domesticity – marriage, children, cohabitating with grown men who still seem incapable of operating a washing machine: ‘‘Don’t do it!’’
Sometimes, on very special occasions, I smooth out my cellulite with not one but two layers of stretchy shapewear. (Asked the 6-year-old daughter of one of my best friends, a woman also in her 40s, ‘‘are all mummy bottoms bumpy?’’)
I wear a pinny in the kitchen. (Granted, it’s a handstitched denim apron made by an artisan seamstress in Minnesota, giving it hipster credentials, but it’s a pinny nonetheless.) I grow gypsophila. Not only do I make the birthday buttonholes for my local Countrywomen’s Institute, binding dainty sprigs of gypsophila, carnations and ‘Cecile Brunner’ sweetheart rose buds with florist’s tape, I pin them to my lapel with pride rather than irony.
In the supermarket, I no longer bother to check how many artificial flavours, colours or calories are contained in the average packet of biscuits. Not because I don’t care if my children are eating junk food, but because I can’t see the ingredients fine print unless I’m wearing my reading glasses.
I always forget to put my reading glasses in my handbag.
I have a fangirl crush on Kim Hill, not Kim Kardashian.
I’m developing a fondness for rhododendrons.
I’m developing a fondness for the word fondness.
I’ve opened an account at Kiwibank and I always fill my car with gas at Z Energy because they’re New Zealand owned.
I lie to my husband about how much everything costs.
My favourite thing to do on Friday and Saturday nights is sit on the couch and watch Coronation Street.
I no longer answer the phone at night – especially if Coronation Street is on – unless I recognise the caller’s number, and I fib about my age when telemarketers ask to speak to someone aged 18-35 in the household shopper category.
My teapot has a hand-knitted cosy.
I don’t even bother to blush if I accidentally fart in public. It could be worse. If 40 is the new 50, I suspect that 70 is the new seven: the last time I took my father, a bona fide, Gold Cardclutching pensioner, out to a posh cafe for lunch, he tried to order fish and chips off the kids’ menu. And when I admonished him for his parsimony, he ordered a burger instead, but made my mother eat half of it.
I don't even bother to blush if I accidentally fart in public.
lynda.hallinan@fairfaxmedia.co.nz