A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It’s the moment in life that you never saw coming – and if you did, you’d vowed it wouldn’t be allowed to come to pass…the moment in life when you turn into your father or mother.

And now – thanks to the clever people in the marketing department at Marks & Spencer – we can put an age on it.

If you’re a man, this happens when you’re 45, and for women, it’s a few years earlier, at 42.

That’s when you switch from looking forward to nights out and crave nights in; when you regularly complain about the weather and the loud music on the radio; when you don’t acknowledge that you’re getting older, but you always complain how everyone else – the teachers, the guards, the politicians – all look like they’re still in school.

And you refuse to acknowledge that their average age is the same that it’s always been – but you’re the one who is moving on in years.

It’s when you nod off in front of the television in the middle of the evening news and you wake up in the middle of Reeling in the Years – and you think the news is still on.

It’s when, not alone do you not know they music in the charts, you’ve never even heard of the bands producing it.

And it’s when you buy new clothes and then it dawns in you that you’re finally dressing like your parents – and like how they actually always wanted you to.

You go to bed at the time you used to head out at – and the last thing you do, after checking the doors and letting the cat out, is you fill a hot water bottle to soothe your creaking bones.

It’s when you need a cushion under you and at your back so you’re comfortable when you sit on the couch. And of course you have a favourite chair; you feel discommoded if you have to sit anywhere else.

It’s when you look in the mirror and realise you look like your own father – right down to the disappearing hairline.

You constantly give out about the heat being left on given the cost of oil these days – and finding the red light glowing on the immersion will send you into a veritable tailspin.