There comes a time in life when you realise that your body is no longer the finely tuned machine it once was. Instead, it has become an unreliable second-hand car, complete with creaky joints, dodgy wiring, and a concerning tendency to misplace important parts (such as the ability to remember why you walked into a room). One minute, you’re effortlessly reading tiny ingredients lists on the back of a cereal box, and the next, you’re holding menus at arm’s length like an Elizabethan scholar examining a particularly baffling manuscript.
And so, the slow, undignified march into middle age begins.
The Great Glasses Conspiracy
It starts small. A mild inconvenience. Perhaps you notice that menus in dimly lit restaurants have become suspiciously blurry, as if the entire hospitality industry has collectively conspired to print everything in 6pt font just to annoy you. “It’s just eye strain,” you mutter, holding the menu at various distances like you’re attempting semaphore. You blame the lighting. You blame tiredness. You refuse to acknowledge that the problem might, in fact, be you.
Then comes the begrudging trip to the optician, where you are forced to admit that, yes, the tiny letters have betrayed you. After an absurdly expensive eye test that involves being aggressively puffed in the eye by a machine from the Spanish Inquisition, the optician cheerfully announces that, yes, you need reading glasses. Reading glasses. Two words that send a shiver down the spine of anyone still convinced they are, at heart, 27 years old.
From this moment on, you are doomed to own multiple pairs of glasses, all of which will mysteriously vanish at the precise moment you need them. They will lurk in obscure places—down the back of the sofa, inside the fridge, in your car’s glovebox, and occasionally, bafflingly, on top of your own head while you storm around the house ranting about how you just had them.
A Symphony of Clicks, Pops, and Grunts
One of the great betrayals of getting older is the realisation that your body has started providing its own sound effects. Sitting down? Click. Standing up? Pop. Walking up the stairs? A mild grunt of effort, as though you’re being asked to carry a small boulder rather than just yourself.
And then there’s the knees. At some point, for no apparent reason, they decide they’ve had enough. You bend down to tie your shoelace and suddenly find yourself in a game of chance—will you get back up smoothly, or will you need to make a series of increasingly dramatic noises while using a nearby chair for leverage?
Lying on the floor is now a full commitment. You no longer “drop down” to fetch something—you lower yourself carefully, with a moment of solemn contemplation beforehand. And once you’re down there? Well, you may as well make yourself comfortable, because getting up again is going to require some strategic planning and possibly a pulley system.
The Slow, Inevitable Shift in Conversation
One of the more alarming signs of middle age creeping up on you is the way conversations change. You don’t notice it at first. Then, one day, you find yourself earnestly discussing bin liners. And not just in passing—you have opinions. You listen intently while someone recommends a particularly sturdy brand, and you make a mental note to try them.
Weather discussions, once mere filler, now hold genuine value. “We needed that rain,” you hear yourself say, nodding sagely as if you are personally responsible for the success of the nation’s crops. You discuss traffic routes. You praise a well-planned roundabout. You tell people about a new shortcut you’ve discovered, despite the fact that they have shown no indication of caring.
You are, in short, becoming your parents.
Technology: The Unwinnable Battle
Once, you were ahead of the curve. You were the one explaining computers to baffled relatives. Now, technology has started moving suspiciously fast, as if deliberately trying to trip you up. Why does every app now have five different menus? Where did that button go? Why has the remote control suddenly gained 47 extra functions, none of which seem relevant to simply watching the news?
At some point, you will find yourself angrily pressing buttons in a manner that achieves nothing, as though sheer determination alone will force the device to behave. You will glare at your phone like it has personally betrayed you. You will issue increasingly frustrated sighs while pretending you are not struggling. You will also, at some point, call a younger family member for help, only to be told, “You just need to update it,” which somehow makes you irrationally furious.
The Secret Joys of Middle Age
But for all its indignities, there are perks. You no longer have to pretend to care about things that don’t interest you. You are free to embrace comfortable shoes and sensible bedtimes. You can openly declare that pubs are too loud and feel no shame in leaving early.
You develop an uncanny ability to fall asleep during films—not out of boredom, but because sitting still for too long now activates some sort of biological shutdown process. You also no longer care what’s cool, which is remarkably liberating. If you want to spend your weekend comparing different brands of garden shears, you absolutely will.
And, of course, nothing—nothing—will ever match the sheer satisfaction of an early night with a cup of tea, knowing that you no longer have to pretend you’d rather be out somewhere loud and exhausting.
Blame the Lighting
Yes, you might be squinting at menus and making involuntary noises when you get up. Yes, technology is beginning to feel like an elaborate prank designed to expose your incompetence. But if middle age has taught you anything, it’s that adaptation is key.
Need reading glasses? Get five pairs. Constant knee clicking? Pretend it’s a feature, not a flaw. Struggling with your phone? Just hand it to someone younger and pretend you could fix it but can’t be bothered right now.
And if all else fails, just blame the bad lighting. It worked for the menu, and it’ll work for everything else too.
Dwight Warner is the quintessential oddball Brit, with a weirdly American-sounding name, who has a knack for turning the mundane into the extraordinary. Hailing originally from London, now living in the sleepy depths of Lincolnshire but claiming an allegiance to the absurd, Dwight has perfected the art of finding the surreal in real life. Whether it’s a spirited rant about the philosophical implications of queueing or a deep dive into why tea tastes better in a mug older than you, his blogs blur the line between the abstract and the everyday.
With an irreverent wit and a penchant for tangents that somehow come full circle, Dwight Warner doesn’t just write; he performs on the page. His humour is both sharp and delightfully nonsensical, like Monty Python met your nosiest neighbour and they decided to co-write a diary.
Known for being gregarious, Dwight is the life of any (real or metaphorical) party, whether he’s deconstructing the existential crisis of mismatched socks or sharing his inexplicable theories about why pigeons are secretly running the economy.
A larger-than-life personality with a laugh as loud as his opinions, Dwight Warner invites readers to step into a world where everything’s slightly askew—and that’s exactly how he likes it.
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