Senior Moments

Although we can be sure that age will eventually catch up with each and every one of us, what is less certain is precisely how early the first signs of ageing will occur.  After all, if you're in your thirties when your best friend's name mysteriously begins to elude you, what does that say about you?  Even at this early age, you may well be experiencing your first senior moment, after which life will never quite be the same!  Senior moments are perhaps being described as the sort of mental blips that waylay us at the most inconvenient times; sometimes leading to confusion and calamity, they can be infuriating and entertaining in equal measure.  One thing you can be sure of - as this book testifies - is that you are certainly not alone.

Senior moments can strike even the best of us at an early age and the usual reaction to this anomaly is one of utter incredulity - 'I didn't just do or say that, did I?'  No self-respecting person in their thirties or forties wants to be told that their brains, let alone their bodies, are already beginning to decline and fail.  However cruel it may seem, if the name of those oval-shaped objects you keep in the fridge which you can fry, boil or scramble for breakfast, is proving more difficult to conjure up than world peace, it may be time to face the music and embrace this new, brain-addled chapter of your life.

Overnight - or so it appears - you start forgetting your own phone number.  Then you mix your phone number up with your PIN number, followed swiftly by attempting to use your PIN number to access your credit card account.  The day before yesterday you managed to mistake next door's house for your own and tried to unlock the front door, only to realise that instead of picking up the house keys on the way out you accidentally grabbed the keys to the garden shed.  Okay, so you are unlikely to win the award for most switched-on person of the year, but don't go booking yourself in to a lunatic asylum (at least not yet), for all of the above are yet more examples of senior moments.  Enjoy them, relish them, laugh at them, bask in them, but most of all - get used to having them, because from the moment they first rear their mischievous little heads, they will continue to plague you for the rest of your life.

• You start calling your best friend of twenty-five years "Thingy".
  
• You discover that your car has mysteriously parked itself on the other side of the road.
  
• You could paint a picture of it, write a thesis about it, demonstrate how to use it to Olympic standard ... but you can't for the life of you remember its name.
  
• When you stand at the bottom of the stairs, you can't recall whether you were just about to go up to fetch something or whether you've just come down to fetch something.
  
• You try to straighten out the wrinkles in your socks - and discover you aren't wearing any.
  
• You put all the photos you own into a large album, but, try as you might, you can't remember who any of the people are in the photographs.
  
• You've started forgetting simple words such as ... umm, uhhh, ahh ...
  
• Gravity is no longer a term confined to science or geography textbooks, but increasingly refers to your body.
  
• Lawn care has become the highlight of your life.
  
• You sink your teeth into a steak ... and leave them there.
  
• Your partner says, 'Let's go upstairs and make love', and you reply, 'Pick one, I can't do both'.
  
• You know exactly how to play bridge, canasta and Mah Jong - worse still, you look forward to playing them every weekend with your friends.
  
• You're very good at opening a childproof cap ... with a hammer.
  
• The list of things you hate begins to outnumber the list of things you like.
  
• You experience permanent jet lag, yet the last time you stepped on a plane was five years ago.
  
• At the breakfast table you hear 'snap, crackle, pop' and you're not even eating cereal.
  
• You start prefixing every word with 'little' - e.g. 'I'll just have a little lie-down', 'I'll just fix myself a little drink', etc ...
  
• You begin every sentence with 'Nowadays'.
  
• You bend down to pick something up off the floor, then begin wondering what else you could do while you're down there.
  
• You tend to go to restaurants that don't play music - this way you can enjoy hearing what everyone is saying.
  
• You ring someone up but the moment they answer the phone you forget a) who you are calling, b) why you are calling, and c) why you are still living at all.
  
• When you're on holiday your energy runs out before your money.
  
• You begin laying the table for breakfast at six o'clock the previous evening.
  
• You start listening with slightly more concern to any news items containing the word 'pension'.
  
• When you arrive at a party you immediately start planning the time of your departure.
  
• You begin scheduling long car journeys and shopping trips around the number of known public conveniences on your trip.
  
• You start answering your phone ... when it rings on television.
  
• You've thrown out your back trying to open a can of pilchards.
  
• You start going through red traffic lights, but stopping at green ones.
  
• You are paying more and more attention to the government's advice on how to keep warm during the winter.
  
• You're on first-name terms with your pharmacist.
  
• You know the difference between a gastroenterologist, a urologist and an osteopath.
  
• You accidentally open your outgoing post ... on a regular basis.
  
• Rather than opting for G-strings or bikini-style underwear, you are sporting the sort of pants that could double as a parachute.
  
• You are the last to admit that your 'get up and go' has got up and left.