A taste of the latest from Prospect online: Julian Baggini
When I turned 30, too many years ago to mention, I raised a glass and toasted my entry to middle age. Everyone else was shocked, thinking it was premature. Perhaps the real reason for their recoiling was that if 30 was middle aged, that made the rest of them either middle-aged themselves, too close for comfort or—god forbid—old.
To me it was simple mathematics. My life expectancy at birth was not much more than 70, making its midpoint 35. Even if I now have an odds-on chance of making 90, the middle part of that would be from 30 to 60. What bit of “middle” can’t people understand?