Passing Time

Passing Time
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 21, 2015

I arrived at the bus stop, breathless, having jogged across the park and up the grassy embankment to the highway. An elderly gent on the bench seat acknowledged me with a nod. His Labrador, sprawled at his feet, raised one eyebrow in greeting and thumped its tail lazily on the concrete.

“Excuse me,” I asked the owner. “Have I missed the 99?”

“Nothing green’s gone past since we’ve been here.”

Relieved, I sat down and remarked on his dog: “How old is he?”

“Bess? She’s nine.” He reached down to stroke a floppy ear. My bus-stop companion bore a remarkable likeness to Ernest Hemingway: a still handsome face framed by an impressive white beard, trimmed to follow a strong jawline. A navy fisherman’s cap, complete with rope braid, angled across his brow. I noticed the sharp crease in his cotton trousers and his polished brown lace-ups, one of which was wedged under Bess’ barrel chest. Only his walking stick hinted at infirmity. It was topped with a brass duck’s head, the bill worn smooth from constant handling. As we waited, he absentmindedly tapped the footpath with his stick.

“Where’re you off to then?” he said, suddenly. I wondered if he was hungry for conversation.

“I have a dentist’s check-up,” grimacing for his benefit. “Hope it’s a quick one.”

“I’ve given up on teeth,” he said with a chuckle, which turned into a wheeze, exploding into a coughing fit.

When he’d composed himself, I pointed to the duck’s head. “I’m quite taken with your walking stick. I’m supposed to convince my mum to use one – she’s getting a bit unsteady – but she won’t budge. Although I haven’t seen a fancy one like yours.”

“Bought it in London,” he said, giving the handle a twirl. “Been a beauty. Only problem is, the ferrule wears out every six months.”

“The what?”

“The rubber cap bunged on the end here. See?” He raised his stick. “Ferrule. There’s all kinds, but I like this one with the raised bumps underneath. When you’re resting your whole weight on it, it’s the difference between standing up and falling on your face!”

“Who knew walking sticks could be so technical!” I said. He chuckled again, no wheeze this time.

“Do you live near here?” I said, happy to make small talk now it was obvious we’d both missed the bus.

He pointed his stick over his shoulder. “I live three streets that way. Same house for 42 years. My wife died six months ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said quickly, surprised he was sharing such intimacies with a stranger. “It was a long illness,” he continued matter-of-factly. “I was relieved for her at first – she was 81 – but as the months go by, I’m realizing she was the last person I could talk to about the past. My friends are too busy with their own troubles.”

“Do you have family here?”

“One son in Sydney. The other in Albany. They’re good to me, but they got their own families. And I’m getting on for 83. Some days, I can’t imagine getting to 85, but then again, when I was 75 and first diagnosed with cancer, 80 seemed unlikely too.”

“My mum’s turning 80 next year,” I said. “She reckons she’s reached the age of invisibility.”

“Hmmf.” A thoughtful silence stretched between us. “This is the problem for old people,” he said finally. “We’re no longer involved in the main business of life: production and reproduction. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to make ourselves relevant again. But at least we can give you young ones the encouragement to keep at it.”

“Quite frankly, I worry more about losing my marbles,” I said, voicing a private fear. “Dementia runs in the family and I’m terrified it’s sneaking up on me.”

“Luck of the draw, ain’t it,” he replied. “I have problems with my lungs and a weak heart. I’m more deaf than not, but I can hear what I need to with this little gadget in my ear. I can’t see properly and my hip gives me hell, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned – it’s that you’ve gotta keep going. Nothing else for it.”

I heard the crescendo of an approaching diesel. I swivelled to see the 99 bearing down on us and leapt up to wave at the driver.

“C’mon old girl,” I said to Bess the Labrador, still flaccid on the footpath. Her owner, bracing on his stick, heaved himself up.

“She’s allowed on the bus, is she?” I asked, scrabbling for change in my pocket.

“Oh, I’m not waiting for the bus,” said my new acquaintance. “Bess and I just stopped here for a rest. We’ll head off home now. Nice talking.”

Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 7, 2015

My mother has a wind-up toy that has been in our family as long as I have. It’s a little tin duck in a bright orange waistcoat, perched on a metal tricycle. A silver key cranks the clockwork motor hidden under his seat and he takes off, tiny webbed feet pumping the pedals, a blur of duck a l’orange on the loungeroom floor. Then, as the mainspring slackens, he begins to tire, pedalling slower and slower in diminishing circles. Exhausted, he finally whirs to a halt. That duck has faithfully entertained all three of my toddlers, tolerating their knocks and drops and their chubby little fingers overwinding his key. He was built to last, much like my mother.

“Look,” I said to Mum last week, inspecting the toy’s flaking paint and chipped wheels. “He’s getting a bit worse for wear.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. We all wear out eventually.”

As Mum stood up from the table – too briskly – she grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself.

“Dizzy?” I asked, suddenly worried. “You have had breakfast, haven’t you?”

Ignoring me, she strode purposefully into the kitchen.

“You know I can’t eat first thing in the morning!” she said as she filled the kettle.

She clattered a cup onto a saucer. I could tell she was kicking herself for failing to hide her unsteadiness. Above all else, my mother prides herself on being spry.

Her daily constitutional is to ride her bike on a seven kilometre loop of the golf course – fast, and without a helmet. When she hears the postie’s motorbike puttering into her cul-de-sac, she jogs across the front lawn to the letterbox, just to prove to herself she still can. This from a 79-year-old who’s numb from the knees down; who trips and stumbles now that she can no longer feel her feet.

“Idiopathic peripheral neuropathy,” declared her specialist a month ago, as he pricked her ankles with a pin. “Can you feel that?” he asked, working higher up her shins. “Nope,” she said. “Do it harder.”

He raised one eyebrow at me.

“Idiopathic means we don’t know what’s causing the numbness,” he explained. “In old age, we fail gradually and randomly. The nerve endings in your legs are no longer sending messages to your brain. I suggest we run a battery of tests to try to find out why.”

In and out of hospital she went to be probed and prodded. A CAT scan of her brain one day; an MRI of her spinal cord the next; an EMG to test the electrical activity in her muscles – so many medical acronyms in search of a prognosis, all procedures tending gloomwards.

Between her appointments, Mum began a quiet rebellion by gardening barefoot, contrary to doctor’s orders. A life-long recalcitrant, she continued jogging to the letterbox, risking a fall. She snorted when a young intern suggested a walking stick would aid her balance. She turned to jab playfully at me with an arthritic finger: “Don’t you dare!”

“Okay,” I grinned. “No walking stick for Christmas!”

When her neurologist next suggested a lumbar puncture to test her spinal fluid, she protested: “Good grief! Is this really necessary? Some things can’t be fixed, you know.” For the first time, I detected a note of helplessness in her voice.

I went home distressed. Was I complicit in these medical interventions? And for what? The slim chance of a cure? Was this really just perseverance in the face of pointlessness?

Here was this daughter’s dilemma: Did my relentlessly independent mother want me to take care of her this way: with more doctors, more tests, more management? Would I remain a comforting presence in her life if I continued to interfere with her wishes?

Even now, I naively think I can protect her with vigilance. I feel uneasy when she fails to answer her phone. I worry when she’s too tired to eat dinner. We’re in the process of trading places, she and I, but there are no coming of age celebrations when mother and daughter swap roles.

Yesterday, I stopped by her house to find her in a darkened hallway, halfway up a ladder, trying to change a light globe.

“Mum! What are you doing?” I said, unable to hide my alarm. “I thought we agreed – no climbing ladders.”

For once, her ailing memory provided an alibi. “I never agreed to that,” she said, looking down defiantly. “And I’m perfectly capable of changing a light bulb.” The shaking ladder proved otherwise. For my mother, an indignity of ageing is conceding defeat.

As I hugged her goodbye and swung onto my bike for the short ride home, I repeated two questions I’ve been asking her this past year. “Are you happy, Mum?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lonely?”

“No.”

For now, that’s all I care about.

Mind Games

Mind Games
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 15, 2015

I stood uneasily in the cavernous carpark, marooned in a concrete mausoleum. I steered my trolley left and right around grids of pillars and bays. No boxy black station wagon announced itself with the press of my key; no tail lights winked their happiness to see me. I had lost my car in the supermarket carpark. Separation anxiety set in.

After several more minutes of rising panic, I went into hyperdrive. ‘This can’t be happening,’ I chided myself. ‘How could I forget where I parked my car?’

I replayed my arrival an hour earlier: I’d driven off the street, down the ramp, turned left and lucked a space close to the escalator. My brain seized upon ‘escalator.’ That’s it! There are two them in this shopping centre: one at each end of the carpark. I was circling the wrong escalator.

I strode to the far end of the building. There – in exactly the spot I’d pictured – was my station wagon, rear end on display, nose to the wall. I felt a wave of relief. I loaded my groceries into the boot and drove up the exit ramp to breach the daylight. But a nagging sense of unease stayed with me all afternoon.

Is this how a mind starts slipping away? One lapse of concentration in an underground carpark and my memory had failed me. Had I reached that stage in life when forgetting becomes more important than remembering?

I grew up thinking mindlessness was an automatic condition of old age. Dementia stole my grandmother in her 80s; two uncles in their 70s. In recent years, Alzheimer’s has all but erased the sweetness of a favourite aunt. In our family, forgetting is a red flag.

In her 80th year, Mum’s memory has suddenly become an unreliable companion. Some days, forgetting becomes all-consuming. She is repeatedly distracted by the whereabouts of her keys, her wallet, her phone. Last Wednesday, I answered her mayday call and joined the search for her missing keys. We discovered them in the garden, plonked on the lid of the recycling bin.

“Now I remember!” she said. “It’s rubbish day. I had to unlock the side gate to bring the bins in.”

‘It’s no big deal, Ma,’ I said, noting her exasperation. “At least they weren’t in the bin!” She relaxed and gave me a hug. (In our house, keys favour the top shelf of the fridge, the laundry bench and the window sill above the loo.)

I worry Mum’s fickle memory will sabotage her fierce independence. Already, she’s painfully aware of the small gaps appearing in her daily routines.

“Do I need to take these pills here?” she wonders aloud as she make me a cup of tea. “What are these white ones for anyway?”

She tells me how on bad days, tiredness dims her mind and makes her conversation flabby and repetitive. She describes her frustration when mid-sentence, a word sits just out of reach, refusing to come when called for.

“That’s when I’ll say something stupid,” she says, “trying to cover up my embarrassment.”

“It happens to everybody,” I reassure her. I’m already an expert at clumsy word spillage.

I notice Mum is now clinging to her diary. It’s her antidote to forgetting: a painstakingly transcribed almanac of appointments and errands, birthdays and passwords. Her diary is stuffed with letters and receipts – life’s paperwork, held together with an elastic-band.

“Just a minute,” she’ll say down the phone, when I suggest we meet for lunch. “Let me write that down.” Remembering has become hard work but forgetting has not slowed her down.

She’s still the gadabout she’s always been. Her life is a whirlwind of coffees and dinners and concerts. Her evening constitutional is a seven kilometre bike ride, or an hour’s walk along the beach. She catches the train to every Eagles home game. Afterwards, hoarse from barracking, she’ll take herself off to dinner ‘somewhere nice.’ She’d walk home in the dark if we’d let her.

Now and then, we sit together in a windowless waiting room, hoping a doctor will give her pockmarked memory a name. “Nothing wrong here,” they’ll say, inspecting the report from her latest scan. “Age-related memory loss, we call it. Getting old’s no fun, is it?”

“Better than the alternative,” she shoots back, enjoying her joke.

Last week, as she waltzed in our back door to join us for dinner, I asked if she’d remembered to put her bins out.

She smiled and settled herself onto a stool.

“Nope,” she said. “Remind me again when I leave.” She leant over and whispered to my youngsters. “At least I’ve never forgotten where I parked my car.” The kids snickered.

“Pretty funny for a Tuesday night, aren’t you Ma,” I said, dishing out the casserole. And then I faltered, spoon in mid-air. “It is Tuesday, right?”

Suit Yourself

Suit Yourself
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 4, 2015

Most of us are occasionally troubled by the prospect of looking passé. Except my husband. Not quite fifty, his latest fashion fancy is dressing like a squire en route to a clay pigeon shoot.

Last week he sauntered in the door after work, tummy first, proudly sporting a new woollen puffer vest.

From the high ground beside my kitchen bench, I watched him bimble down the hallway, shuffling through the day’s mail. His puffer vest was constructed from some variety of battledress serge, gunmetal grey, with the delicate weave of an army blanket. A 360-degree matrix of padded panels hugged his torso like a mattress. He wore his new vest zipped to his throat, emphasising a dewlap of chin. Here, I thought, is a man who likes to be protected from the elements while still remaining camouflaged in the field.

“Cold outside?” I smirked.

He leaned in to kiss me hello but didn’t take the bait.

Up close, I saw his new vest had a reinforced shoulder patch, presumably to absorb gun recoil. And superfluous pockets for spent cartridges.

“Been shooting grouse, darling?”

He ignored me and settled himself on a stool, noisily spreading his newspaper on the bench. I couldn’t help myself. I took a step towards him and gave him a hug, then fondled the nap of his new vest. I hooked one thumb inside the armhole and made a pretence of checking the density of the padding, kneading the wadding between my fingertips like a Savile Row sempstress.

“Goose filling?” I enquired.

He looked up and addressed me with an expression of wearisome disdain.

“Only one goose here,” he deadpanned, and went back to his paper.

Out-foxed, I resolved to reclaim the crown of marital oneupmanship.

“Honey,” I said sweetly, reaching for his shoulders to gently rotate him towards me. “What I’m about to say is an observation, not a criticism. But a middle-aged man affectionately described as ‘portly,’ should probably steer clear of any item of clothing referred to as ‘puffer.’”

He shrugged: “Like I give a toss.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the end of our conversation. I was lost for the last word. I decided to leave the low-end of men’s fashion well alone and resumed skinning potatoes for a shepherd’s pie. Contemplating my peelings, however, I wondered if my husband had lost interest in his appearance.

In recent months, I’ve noticed his laissez-faire attitude towards costume. Last weekend, he returned, grinning, from a shopping expedition. With a flourish, he pulled from a Best ‘n Less bag, a black t-shirt shouting in white capitals: “IF YOU NEED ANYTHING FROM ME, RECONSIDER.”

I’ve never understood the point of talking t-shirts. Wearing a joke on your chest is like telling the same gag over and over until people recoil at the sight of you.

What’s more, there comes a time in a man’s life when his t-shirts no longer fit as they should. They glide over the shoulders nicely enough, but then cling to a pair of chest hillocks and a mound of midriff. ‘Thickening’ is the polite term, but I like to refer to it as ‘tittiness.’ I’d like more vanity from my husband, not less.

But what confounds me most is the enjoyment he derives from other peoples’ reactions to his lurid ensembles. This is a man who has never been afraid of colour. For a friend’s birthday lunch at a swish winery, he partnered his favourite neon-green polo shirt, (a small rip under the arm; fraying at the collar) with a pair of navy chinos, a black – possibly bulletproof – neoprene vest and his new fawn desert boots.

“Well howdy Walker, Texas Ranger!” I drawled as he emerged from the bathroom in a waft of Rexona. He rolled his eyes and pointed to his suede boots: “Soft as a slipper, light as a feather, tough as the desert,” he intoned, gathering his wallet and keys.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for self-expression. I can enjoy the irony of a nearly 48-year-old man wearing an 88-year-old man’s cardigan. I can tolerate a lilac polo shirt, brown corduroys and orange sneakers. I’m even amused when they’re worn concurrently. But I draw the line at a gaping armhole and a shirt missing twenty-percent of its collar.

We pulled into the winery car park. As I followed my middle-aged fashion plate into the restaurant, I thought I saw several heads swivel. An elderly woman tracked him as he passed, then whispered to her husband. A man seated to my left let out a soft sarcastic whinny.

And suddenly, I felt defensive of my Lone Wolf McQuade. He of the beige desert boot, the XL puffer vest, the electrified lime polo.

Vanity’s a nuisance. The conceited are by turns annoying or absurd. How refreshing to find a man devoid of narcissism. And bulletproof to boot.

Mother Love

Mother Love
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 13, 2015

I joined the tail of the takeaway coffee queue as two women settled themselves at an empty table beside me. The older woman signalled the waitress by gesticulating above her head. The younger one looked away, abashed.

The older woman ordered a latte.

“Can we keep that door open?” she asked the waitress politely, pointing at the cafe’s front door.

“It’s a bit stuffy.”

Her companion appeared mortified. “Mum!” she whispered urgently. “It’s fine.”

The waitress obligingly edged the door ajar. The mother smiled her thanks and leaned across the table, eager to chat. She looked sweet, sensible, middle-aged.

I guessed the daughter was about 15, fully grown but still gauche. She was clearly miffed at having a mother make preposterous demands of a waitress.

My mum and I once inhabited the same parallel universe. Aged 16, I feared a shopping expedition was doomed if Mum suggested she join me. What if she wore her enormous paisley scarf? What if someone overheard her making a fuss in the change rooms? Would she reflect badly on me? I was such a teenaged twerp.

But if I rewind my memory further to when I was small, I can remember my desperation to be near her. The smell of her was a heady melange of Oil of Olay, Velvet soap and talcum powder. I can recall the shape of her beautiful hands, the slender fingers, their perfect oval nails. I loved her smooth muscled calves; can still hear the buzz of her Remington Princess electric shaver as she sanded her legs before tennis. I’m still able to summons the scent of her Coty lipstick; how she’d kiss my forehead as I sat in her lap, my head tucked under her chin, breathing in the warmth of her neck. Nothing ever went wrong in my life when she was around.

Until I was eight. I’d started a new school. Mum had a new job and a new habit of arriving late to collect me.

“Mr Elsner needed me to type a letter,” she’d say.

Or: “I had to take dictation.”

I didn’t care about the demands on a working single mother, because I was the last child left clinging to the monkey bars in the deserted playground. All my friends were home drinking Ovaltine and snarfing Gingernuts. My mother was likely dead. She’d been hit by a truck. Or shot by a bank robber. By the time her battleship-grey Sigma rounded the corner, I was already in an orphanage and inconsolable. The world was a fearful place without her.

Age 11, she whacked me across the ear. I’d been whining and thrashing about while she tried to brush my knotted hair. I deserved that slap. But I pretended to be deaf for two days.

“Pardon?” I strained, cupping my good ear so she’d have to repeat her question. On day three she apologised, but I was tired of being deaf by then. It was a hollow victory.

Aged 26 and living in Sydney, I couldn’t wait for her visits. We’d drink G & T’s on my cramped balcony and plan weekend adventures in the Blue Mountains. She was as much fun as any of my girlfriends. They came to her for advice about terrible bosses and wayward boyfriends. She could empathise with any problem.

She walked me down the aisle the day I was married. She was as excited as I was, until she saw the crowd and had to pause to overcome her nerves. When I was pregnant, she’d feel her way around my belly while explaining to her unborn grandchild the importance of following the Eagles.

As I grappled with the stricken nights and foggy days of multiple motherhood, she’d arrive with a cottage pie and a tray of baked apples. Then she’d gather up baby, toddler and nine-year-old and herd them to the park to play Frisbee.

My children call her Noo-Noo. Always have. None of us can remember why. This year, Noo-Noo’s 79th, she and I are spending a lot of time in doctors’ waiting rooms. I now hold her arthritic hand the way she held my grandmother’s. I see her skin has become crepe-paper thin, the knuckles swollen, the fingers painfully bent.

We laugh at what’s become of her beautiful hands, what the years will do to mine. She tells me she found her missing keys in the fridge. Ten minutes later she tells me again. I smile and nod but I fear for the prospect that mother and daughter are reversing roles.

The doctor writes her another script to add to her collection. We go for coffee before I drop her home. She talks about the opera season in New York, how much she’d love to go. “Maybe I should stay closer to home,” she says. I think I hear a tinge of unease. But she’s already up and gleefully inspecting the cake cabinet.

Older and Wiser

Older and Wiser
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 16, 2015

I spot a friend’s elderly father sitting outside the cafe with his coffee. A brisk north-easterly has turned Kirwin Street into a wind tunnel. A gust flaps his newspaper and whips a flurry of dry leaves under his table but he’s unperturbed.  

“Edward!” I say. “It’s freezing out here. Come inside and have your coffee with me.”

He hoists himself up to kiss my cheek. We move inside to a table by the wall. Edward, dapper in a navy sportscoat and crisp shirt, sweeps one hand across his glabrous head, flattening a few token wisps to his pate.

“How are you?” I say. It seems an obvious question to ask an 87-year-old.

“Can’t complain,” he replies. “I can still read the paper without glasses.”

I detect a note of pride.

“But my teeth are wearing out,” he adds. “I’m going to get new dentures and have the teeth of a 20-year-old. That’ll confuse the ladies!”

I ask about his left knee. (Long pestered by arthritis, it was reconstructed last year). He gives it a slap.

“It feels brand new!” he says, then cranes forward as if to tell me a secret.

“You know, I was dying at 71. My aorta was leaking.”

He unfastens the top button of his shirt and gives me a glimpse of the scar he says bisects him from throat to navel.

“They fixed me up with a pacemaker and a new aorta made of Kevlar. Kevlar! Now I’m bulletproof. I could live for a thousand years. The question is: would I want to?”

I wonder what’s coming next.

“At my age, people die. I’ve said goodbye to almost everybody.” He rattles off a catalogue of three dead brothers, long gone friends, neighbours, classmates, colleagues, the dentist.

“People my age are only alive because death’s forgotten to visit.”

“But are you lonely?”

“Of course! No-one wants to be alone. I miss the warmth of another body sleeping next to mine. But my life is never dull or empty. The good thing about getting old is there’s finally time for thinking. I like to speculate on the nature of human beings. In the mornings, I lie snug in my bed for a long time.” He chuckles. “Because I can!”

“Would you like to meet someone?”

“Where would I find another Barbara?” he ponders aloud. “I was so desperately in love with Barbara.”

His voice trails off and I study my coffee foam to give him a moment to collect himself.

“She was a helluva catch. I was eight years older. She died of lung cancer at 65. She was just a kid, for goodness sake!” I hear the bitterness in his voice, but then he softens.

“That’s the unfairness of life, isn’t it? I’ve never recovered from Barbara’s death. I’m not sure I want to.”

I stay silent.

“A man is only the reflection of the woman he lives with,” he says with a smile. “She completed me. We were married for 45 years. She’s been gone twelve years. It feels like an eternity.”

He brightens.

“But a large family is a good shock-absorber: five children, eight grand-children, four great-grand-children. When I’m with them, life’s fantastic.”

I tell him about my middle son’s upcoming birthday and ask: “How do you think of the future?”

“I make plans. I want to putter down the canals of France in a houseboat; go places I’ve never been. In January I cruised from Sydney to Fiji. There were 2000 passengers. I went to a singles night but only four people turned up. And two of them had partners.”

We snort in unison.

“You know, time goes faster as you get older. But it’s not time that’s going faster – it’s me going slower. Old age is what happens as you wear out. Like the soles of your shoes – week by week, slowly, imperceptibly, and then one day they’re just too worn out to put on. They’ve outlived their purpose.” He quotes a Jaques’ line from As You Like It:

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

He inspects the mottled skin on his still manly hands. “I’m doing okay, compared to some. I’m gobsmacked by my own good luck. How have I managed to get this far in such good nick? My memory’s the problem now. I can feel the fine details fading out. I see people I’ve known for 40 years and I can’t remember their names.”

It’s time to go. I feel buoyant after my half hour with this insightful, perpetually youthful old man. He stands up to say goodbye. “Luck is everything,” he reminds me.

I sit in the car and reflect, wondering if he’s right.

Middle Ground

Middle Ground
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 28, 2015

A hair salon is a dangerous place for an existential crisis. Propped in a padded chair, I wear a black plastic cape like a shroud. A black hand-towel encircles my neck, fastened tightly at my throat with a press-stud. The young hairstylist stands behind me and slops her brush into a puddle of hair dye on her trolley. She carves a centre parting along my scalp then slaps her loaded brush back and forth across my greying head as if she’s painting a picket fence.

At some point, every client at the hairdressers must confront their reflection. And so, reluctantly, I drop my Woman’s Day and examine my mirror image. I’m pinned under a beam of white light from a ceiling as black as my middle-aged despair. (Salon lighting is designed to show off your hair at the expense of your face).

I inspect left and right, but no matter where I look, the maze of mirrors reflects bits of me I don’t want to see. I stare at my profile, wondering why my nose looks bigger than it used to. The back of my head is flatter than I remember. (Note to self: no more ponytails.) I see half-moons of blue shadow under my eyes. I’ve never noticed them before. When did my frown deepen from a crease to a furrow? My neck! Is that my neck? Why is there a pouch under my chin? I lift my chin, clench my jaw and the pouch tightens, then disappears, replaced by a collection of stringy tendons that stretch from jaw to collar bone. I pray to Hebe, Goddess of Youth, to spare me the arrival of those fleshy, drooping jowls.

I have been young all my life until now. Overnight, spots are appearing on the backs of my hands in pretty shades of fawn. My shape is shifting. A belt once emphasised my waist. Now it advertises tummy spillage. I have acquired what my nan used to call an ‘ample bosom.’ I no longer flaunt my knees in short skirts.

If I cover my left eye, the razor-edged fronds on the palm outside the window become a blur. If I cover my left, they turn to green fuzz. But with my glasses on, I can discern a lone ant marching down the spine. I spend more time thinking about the whereabouts of my specs than my children.

Middle age has reminded me I’ve run out of time to become a ballerina or capture a Higgs boson. Those dreams are dead. I failed to tap my potential. Squandering time was my teenaged occupation. In my twenties, life stretched boundlessly before me – there would be time for everything. How is it I have been to the funerals of three close friends my age?

At the Royal Show, I discovered fear has replaced recklessness. With seven-year-old son tugging me towards the rollercoaster, I passed off the knot in my stomach as excitement. I bought two tickets to the Wild Mouse, which seemed far scarier re-named the Python Loop. As the wheels began to rumble, I gave my son a fake grin and for the next two minutes, rode that rollercoaster with my eyes clamped shut in terror. Vertigo suffocated any euphoria. Middle age has taught me my limits.

Over 40s should not heap scorn on the young. It brands us as obsolete. Last week at a dinner, we mums lampooned our offspring’s bad taste in music.

“Have you actually listened to Limp Bizkit?” asked one. “The language is foul!”

We chimed in with our own examples until someone piped up: “Listen to us! We sound like our mothers!”

For a moment, we were dumbstruck.

I thought back to the day my own Mum announced she wouldn’t pay for ballroom dancing lessons just so I could obsess about the boys from the school next door. “You’re too old to understand!” I shouted, and flounced off to my room, satisfied I’d inflicted a punishing blow. She yelled back: “You’re too young to know anything!” Beneath my outrage, I suspected she was right.

Already, I feel my life narrowing. Ten years ago, a Saturday night at home was unthinkable. Now two nights out in a row is the result of poor planning.

No-one in the family wants to see me dance anymore. With Footloose on the telly, I spring out of the sofa. Teenage son mimes a cry for help.

“C’mon honey!” I yell. “I used to be a great dancer!”

“No, you didn’t. I can tell,” comes his withering reply. My hip wiggle peters out. I fear I’m the equivalent of a 50-year-old man growing a ponytail.

Perhaps middle age is the time to reflect – not on the aspirations we failed to realise – but on the bad things that never happened. In the meantime, I won’t be quitting dancing until the music stops.