Getting old joblessly

It’s a funny thing, your mid late 20s. A strange time for assessing what you have achieved, where you have got to at this the stage in your life where you have (supposedly) never been more beautiful and free and yet where all that comes next is likely to have the taint of age, wrinkles and contemplations of whether it really is ever too soon to start with the Botox.....Seriously, I want me a non-moving forehead and pillow cheeks.

Like Kylie....




Is that eyebrow arched in a coquettish way, love, or did it just get put back on in the wrong place?









Although, take heed, Kyles, how quickly it all gets out of hand......






It’s purty......











Overly-botoxed slebs aside, your mid 20s is really the first time you seriously sit back and take stock of where you have got to, and you really should have got somewhere good. You know, have had a novel published about your precocious sexual exploits, set up your own ethical e-business selling cupcakes made from recycled chewing gum, directed your own feature film on some up-and-coming band writing lyrics in their own blood.....etc. etc. And all by the age of 25.

I am over 25, have done none of these things and appear to be starting my life all over again. This is not good. In columns-of-cool terms, I would be languishing at the bottom with tango tans and Joe McElderry.

Anyways, this weekend, my lovely friends and I - the script writer, the arts officer, the TV lovelies and the jobless waster (that would be me, just to signpost) - were sitting in a Bristol pub, supping the West Country’s finest alco-apples, all figuring out where we come in on the grand “what’s hot and what’s not” column of life.

We’re talking about relationships. Of course, what else? We’re a generation of women who grew up with More’s position of the month, Sex and the City and Bridget Jones, complete with the stigma of cat ownership.



We’re all in relationships (none of us have cats....yet).

Gone for us are the days of waking up in bed with a random, with a pounding head and a mouth like an ashtray, our pants over a lampshade and shame in our bellies. Gone also are the days when twenty eight V&Ts and a bucket of any-thing-but-chardonnay would serve as lubrication for a Saturday night, leading to the unsuitable liaisons and ill-advised table dancing.

But what I didn’t realise was that we had all got THERE. You know home-ownership, marriage, kids type of THERE (.....well I say we have all got there, I discount myself from this, as joblessness tends to mean that mortgages and babies are not top of my current to do list....sorry ma).

Six years ago, the chat would have been about how many unsuitable men we were dating, how wasted we had got the previous weekend and whether skinny jeans would ever catch on. This weekend we all sat there in our spray-on jeans and ironic knits, discussing the minefield of wedding invite lists, musing on the merits of wedding dresses from eBay, and considering how many exciting holidays were left until children came along and condemned us to an annual week in a “child friendly” resort in Lanzarote. Gulp.

It’s not only relationships that mark out the parameters of this new grown-up-ness, it’s also CAREER CONSIDERATIONS. Where am I in my profession? Me: errr, my current profession is being the oldest work experience girl in town. Where am I going? Me: ever so quickly into bankruptcy. When will I be in a safe enough position to get knocked up and still have a decent job when I come back to work? Me: never, never arrrgggh, I’m going to be forced into childlessness through my own self-imposed impecuniosity*.

Surely we are not old enough to have to think about this? Surely.....?

But we are.

How quickly time pilfers our dewy-skinned 20s and lands us almost straight from irresponsible student-hood to fully fledged, crow-footed adulthood. How quickly we are supposed to do something amazing in order to count as being precociously talented. I imagine that, unless I were to take up something obscure like caber throwing (I’m ginger, I could pass as a Scott) or model railway building, I am probably too old to be considered a bright young talent in any endeavour.



How hard can it be?














Not that it’s not exciting times when friends get married, have meteoric rises in their incredible careers and contemplate parenthood. It just feels like this new stage of life has crept up on us and I have woken up at 28, jobless and ill-equipped to cope with the new adult order.

Anyways, all this over-analysing can only lead me to the conclusion that I am having some sort of quarter-life crisis.

As my bank balance will not currently allow me to react to this phase in the classic male mid-life crisis way – buy a Ferrari and hire a bevy of Russian call girls – I shall instead have to distract myself from impending agedness by purchasing a new tyre for my bicycle and treating myself to a large glass of red wine from the pub down the road.

Rock on.

* This is ever such a good word I learnt at law school and like to sporadically throw into conversation to make me appear proper learned, along with such gems as res ipsa loquitor (although don't ask me to explain what it means).