You order a pizza via a popular delivery app. The whole thing is seamless. Pizza arrives piping hot. This is a disaster as you’re now going to order another dozen this calendar year in an attempt to recreate the magic and each will be a congealing mozzarella of disappointment.
You’ve stumbled into a phase where your shoelaces keep coming undone. Talking multiple times a walk. You could obviously do the double bow but it just feels like a level of commitment too far. Did this happen to anyone else in their late-thirties?
It’s raining and it isn’t supposed to. You checked two different apps. You think about your trust issues, which you can directly pinpoint to the time you saw The Perfect Storm in cinemas with your mother and, on George Clooney et al. sailing into the eerie calmness of the storm’s eye, she says hopefully, “Oh, maybe they survive!” Moments later, George is sleeping with the fishes.
A bunch of young kids are playing football in the park and the ball hits you flush on the chest while you’re lying down on the grass. You play it cool, obviously, and wait in anticipation of pro forma apology or at least mild embarrassment from a parent. Neither is forthcoming.
You lose your favourite shoe model to discontinuation. You now have to go to Amazon and import the last remaining stock from Canada. You are warned you may have to pay an additional import charge.
You go for dinner at a young person place that appears to morph into some sort of dance party after 9pm. The security staff are polite by the standards of a nightclub but frightfully rude for a restaurant.
A person who won’t text you back achieves a significant life milestone and you send a card by way of congratulations.
You download an audiobook by a first-time author. It shows. After a couple of expository missteps the plot settles down but it’s too late. You’re rooting not for the protagonist but the author and it’s not helping with the suspension of disbelief thing.
You realise that, on reflection, your plan to reread the first four books of Robert Caro’s ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ over the summer and for this somehow (?) to compel the final volume into existence has proved only a qualified success. It did produce this fun piece but, at roughly 150 hours of audiobook for a single newsletter, you may be single-handedly responsible for offsetting any AI-related productivity gains in the ONS data.
You recently moved to a property on what is effectively a dead end. Yet the street is somehow busier than most dual carriageways. Who are these people and where are they going?
It’s Sunday night, you’re in the supermarket and you’re craving… a ready meal? You haven’t tried one in more than a decade because you vividly recall feeling mildly depressed every time you had one at uni. Though it’s conceivable you were just mildly depressed. You buy salmon, just to be safe.