There was a time when sharing news about illness, injury or impending surgery would elicit a concerned nod, a sympathetic noise or two then a change of subject as soon as politeness allowed.  

But when I recently announced to a gathering of friends, roughly my contemporaries in age, that I was going to have a hip replacement, they reacted with lively interest and everyone wanted to know the who, the where and the when.  

What’s changed?  We’ve all got old, that’s what.  

We used to impose strict time limits on discussion of individual health woes.  Everyone got five minutes, max.  Now, everyone’s been there, done that, and got a story to tell about ‘going under the knife’, as it’s still quaintly put, or about this or that diagnosis or this or that surgeon or this or that hospital or rehab. Sometimes the whole lunch or dinner or whatever is taken up with such talk.

One of my friends observed recently that medical science is keeping us all alive.  We looked around the table and sure enough, each and every person had had some kind of major medical intervention without which ….. well, we didn’t pursue that one too closely and probably at last changed the subject to what we were all watching on Netflix. 

This sobering insight prompted me to think of all the other indicators that one is getting old.

So let’s start with that one.  

You know you’re getting old when …you get together with old friends and the discussion isn’t about marriages, divorces, job changes or even house purchases but instead you compare notes on your physical woes and recent encounters with the medical profession.  

When that subject’s exhausted you turn to the love and work lives of your friends’ children and grandchildren, which are far more interesting than those of you and your friends.  Incidentally, you remember the names of all your friends’ children, but are struggling with the names of their grandchildren.

You know you’re getting old when….

You choose your cafés according to whether they’ve got free newspapers, for which you compete with a bunch of other grey-haired old cheapskates.

You choose your restaurants according to whether they play loud music.  Even then you’re always asking restaurant staff if they would mind turning the music down.  (Well, I do.)

You prefer gardening to partying.

You spend more time in the plant nursery and the hardware store than in fashion boutiques or hairdressers or jewellers.

You love going to bed early.  You’ve morphed into a morning person.

Everyone under 30 looks dazzlingly beautiful to you, although you could have sworn when you were in your teens and twenties there were hardly any people, including yourself, and apart from models and movie stars, who were beautiful.

You no longer break into a trot or a skip or god forbid a run for fear of falling over.

You don’t like action movies any more.  Or fantasies.  Or sci-fi.  Or is that just me?

You fast-forward through the sex scenes on TV.  Why don’t they kiss silently like in the good old days, without all that amplified face-sucking?  Again, this might just be me.

You no longer go to quiz nights because there are too many questions about pop culture people you’ve never heard of.  

Related indicator:  You know you’re getting old when you go to see the new Superman movie and you’ve never heard of the any of the young cast.  Hang on, there’s Bradley Cooper playing Jor El, Superman’s father.  But Cooper’s a young fellow, isn’t he?  What’s he doing playing the father of an adult son?  

You know you’re getting old when you remember when those chewy chocolate-coated cubes now called caramel mates were called ‘cobbers’. And you remember that they cost a halfpenny, pronounced HAPE-ny.  

Speaking of old currency, I saw a news story recently about the Evandale penny-farthing race, which included for the benefit of younger viewers an explanation of why those funny old-fashioned bikes are so-called.  As an oldie, you need no explanation.  To further drive home the point about how old you are, you can remember seeing, as I once did, an actual farthing in circulation as legal tender.  It was a bit of a novelty at the time, I hasten to add.  

You know you’re getting old when the dictionaries announce their Words of the Year and they either have no relevance to you or you don’t understand them or you’ve never heard of them. 

The Macquarie Dictionary chose ‘AI slop’:  AI-generated text that’s inaccurate and unhelpful.  Fair enough.  I’ve had my own experiences with that one.  

Cambridge picked ‘parasocial’, which describes the imaginary relationship some people have with celebrities.  Like all those young female journos and influencers who squealed with delight on social media when Taylor Swift announced her wedding date, as if she were their sister or bestie!  Being old, I just harrumphed grumpily and remained sincerely indifferent.  

Dictionary.com chose ‘67’, the name for that curious fad that has kids and teens shouting out that number whenever they hear it.  I know there’s a backstory there somewhere but it makes no sense to me and as far as I’m concerned 67 is just a boring number.   Digression:  In my youth it was ‘69’ that triggered nudges, winks and guffaws.  Is it the same for young folks today, I wonder?

‘Vibe-coding’ however, has got me beat. Collins Dictionary’s choice of WOTY means ‘the practice of using artificial intelligence to write computer code from natural language prompts instead of manual coding’.  I don’t really understand it and I’ve never heard or seen anyone use it!

Finally:  You’re know you’re getting old when you expect shop assistants, police officers, nurses, doctors, teachers, journalists, newsreaders, lawyers, dentists and politicians, in fact anyone with a job, to be younger than you. But you know you are REALLY old when even the Pope is younger than you!

This article was first published in the New Norfolk and Derwent Valley News.  On reading it, the editor, who’s not even old, said he’s beginning to feel that way because the young man in his photos isn’t the same person he sees in the mirror.  

He had another age inkling when on giving a Remembrance Day talk to local schoolkids he says he felt the need to explain that the Great War was so-called because it was big, not good!