When I was little I used to look at grown ups doing all those grown up things and wonder to myself just when do you become a grown up and how does that feel? This weekend I came to the conclusion that 20 odd years later I’m still asking the same question…
On Friday it was Dom’s birthday and to celebrate we decided to set off on a last minute adventure and headed across our beautiful home county and into the Yorkshire Dales. Pn the recommendation of a friend we’d booked ourselves into accommodation at a nice olde-worlde Yorkshire pub with a fairly impressive private natural waterfall within its grounds, plenty of nice ales and a very tasty full english in the morning. All sounding rather grown-up so far. Except that en route to the pub we had planned a stop-off that (aside from the attraction of the in-house tearoom) was altogether less grown up and that definitely proved to us both that getting older doesn’t always make you more grown-up…
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The attraction in question was The Forbidden Corner, a park that promotes itself as “The Strangest Place in the World” and it’s not far wrong. Barely had we set foot in the place before we were running around like 10 year olds trying to find our way through the mazes and underground tunnels, find the right exit in a room of rotating identical doors, get soaked by hidden water fountains and tick off our list of what we had managed to see and find. It’s a truly bonkers place but one that undoubtedly makes you feel like a big kid, and that’s definitely right up our street!
So if, with the big 3-0 approaching, I can still find myself running around with as much excitement as my young nephews, then when exactly will I start to feel like an actual grown-up? In terms of a tick-box list of what makes up the components of a grown-up I imagine I wouldn’t score badly: Married – check, mortgage – check, spent part of a weekend away buying a new teapot – check, have listened to radio 4 and made a comment about the state of the economy – check (although to be fair the comment was regarding the over-inflated price of Curly Wurly’s. Aside from being a father it seems I must clearly be a grown-up in every sense, so why don’t I feel like one?
Well it turns out that the whole “you’re only as old as you feel” thing is not just something old people say and is actually seemingly more or less true. We spend our whole lives obsessed with age – as kids we can’t wait to be taken seriously as adults, to get married and to not get told off anymore (little do our childhood selves know that getting told off is part and parcel of getting married) yet the moment our childhood is over we start to mourn it and wish we could do all those things we used to do before we had responsibilities and had to worry about what people might think…
Well who the hell cares what people might think! Don’t sit around moping that you’re getting older, get out there and do something fun, something spontaneous and crazy like your 12 year old self used to do. Run wild and enjoy yourself for a little while! Yes as we get older we gain responsibilities but having responsibilities doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy yourself too! We were never designed to be those all-knowing grown-ups we as children believe in, we were never designed to stop learning or to stop playing and trying things out. I’m not sure we ever really feel like grown-ups and if we did life might be that little bit less enjoyable. So whether you’re a kid of 6 or of 60 it’s officially play time, get out there and have some fun!
