My Mid-Life Manifesto

 

- Susie Fowler-Watt

THIS WEEK, for the first time in my life, I forgot my hairdresser’s appointment. In the summer, to my absolute shame and embarrassment, I stood up my friend Rachel, who was waiting to have lunch with me in a Norwich restaurant. My shifts at work had changed, and it completely slipped my mind until I got a text saying: ‘Are you still OK for lunch?’ 15 minutes after I was meant to have arrived.

The thing that shocked and upset me about these incidents was that they were both in my diary. It now seems that a diary in itself is not enough – I have to set myself reminders for events in my diary. This is not me; I have always been the one with an almost photographic memory. But those photos are curling and fading to sepia.

I recently interviewed the writer Allison Pearson, who has caught up with her ‘I don’t know how she does it’ heroine Kate Reddy in a new book. Kate is now my kind of age. Virtually every page made me laugh out loud – there was a lot in it that seemed to echo my life; juggling teenagers (or nearly teens), elderly parents and a job, at a time of life when your own hormones are playing havoc.