Age and Experience

A bad thing happened to me the other day. I was out and about with a friend - we wanted to find somewhere to have a drink - preferably somewhere with seats because we'd been on our feet for a wee while. Anyway the locality in which we found ourselves seemed to have only one drinking establishment and no seats.

Oh well. I'm still quite young, surely I can survive another few hours on my feet. It was a very good job I was wearing sensible shoes (even if they were bright red racing boots and didn't really go with what I was wearing): if I believed in it, I'd call it Karma, or something equally perplexing where stuff just happens.

When I arrived with this friend the music was fairly quiet - much like the place itself. This changed. A lot. When we hit 11.30pm a whole stream of students poured in and the music was cranked up a notch - in fact several. This made our conversation a little difficult, but we soldiered on.

By about 12.30 I had made a remarkable discovery. Apart from one exception, me and my friend were the oldest people there. Ouch. Big ouch. I felt all of my years in an instant. Bus pass anyone?

In fact all the people around my age were in pubs with seats, resting their potentially arthritic knees and not in a club full of students in fancy dress dancing to The Backstreet Boys and Rhianna.

You may remember I mentioned we were the oldest but for an exception. There was another group of, ahem, older people not too far from us and it wasn't long before we were looking for safety in wrinkly numbers just in case one of us got picked off (or even up) by some spotty adolescent by mistake.

This brings me, in a round-about way, to the concept of age and experience. In my head people always say age vs. experience, but surely they mean the same thing - if you're older you've had more experience (whether that be in work or just in life). Ok so there are some really irritating people that have bags and bags of experience and they're still only 18. We all hate those people, so let's not talk about them anymore.

In my opinion instead of age vs. experience, it should read age and experience vs. potential: that's really the only thing that you can compare - what a person has achieved vs. what a person might achieve. It boils down to the safe option vs. the risk.

That's all well and good, but at the beginning of this post I was feeling old - I was feeling all of my years and getting ready to cash in my pension plan. So I'm old but wait, I have no experience. At this point I want to say that I don't feel old and I haven't bought my first pot of anti-ageing cream yet, but I'm getting into my twenties and I still lack that elusive experience that is a) paid and b) permenant.

Bummer.

In the meantime, I'm going to stick to drinks at my local and places I can get to with my bus pass...