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There’s the passing of time, of course. Christmas feels about five minutes ago, and now it’s nearly winter. An invitation arrived for my 40-year school reunion this month. I’m so not prepared for it to be four decades since sunbaking lunchtimes with Brigitte and Sally and Nicki, uniforms hiked up, baby oil on legs, discussing the grand lives and loves that lay ahead.
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Technology addiction. I sniff at parents in playgrounds or students at bus stops, heads bent, ignoring their kids, friends, the world. Somehow, suddenly, I’m one of those blithely spending more time with the tiny computer in my hand than with people in my heart and home. I’m trying to work out what gap it’s filling while cursing its sneakiness.
There’s financial trickiness. The call from a doctor saying don’t worry, but I want you to have a biopsy. Stress. The quietly mounting demands of work, family and personal obligations that leave you too frazzled and depleted to plan a rejuvenating holiday.
More widely, the mad global weather situation, where even if you do book the holiday you’ll get blown away by an unseasonal typhoon.
And the crisis of men killing and hurting women. The government’s acting like this has somehow not been happening since we were in caves. That it’s a contemporary situation that’s caught them on the hop and they have to come up with solutions on the fly.
Like deciding that moderating what teenagers masturbate to could be more effective than hiking up the price of booze and toughening bail laws and making offenders wear leg bracelets forever so the next woman they buy a drink for doesn’t think, “He seems like a nice guy”.
Beware the thing you don’t plan for, people. The one that taps you on the shoulder like a pantomime villain. And if you have to make unwise footwear choices, don’t mix them with roadies.
Kate Halfpenny is the founder of Bad Mother Media.
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