Senior Moment

Let me introduce you to a new English expression that I encountered yesterday. It's "Senior Moment". This new term hasn't reached the Oxford English Dictionary yet as far as I know, but it came to me via my mother during a phone call the other day.

A senior moment seems to refer to one of those times when you forget something, are absent-minded or perhaps acting a bit like a senile old fart. The senior part obviously refers to a Senior Citizen, hence 'senior moment'! It's basically a euphemism for losing your mind, going nuts, being one brick short of a full load, or, as we used to say years ago, "going Ga-Ga".

Seeing as it was my 43rd birthday only a couple of weeks ago, I have been thinking very hard about whether or not I am going Ga-Ga, or whether I am having a mid-life crisis or something like that. After all, I recently grew a goatee beard to make myself look more cool, which may be a sign of going round the bend, or a Senior Moment, because my goatee is decorated with two lovely snowy-white patches of grey hair on either side of my chin!

But yesterday, I had a serious Senior Moment which worried me, although looking back at it, I suppose it was rather amusing. It all started when I had dropped my wife back home after taking her to breakfast at Chilipeppers. It was my day to teach the Masters class at the university, so I kissed the wife goodbye and set off on my journey to the Fun Factory as usual. I hadn't even reached the next street on our housing estate when the Senior Moment happened.

I checked my left pocket to make sure I had my bunch of keys, but couldn't find them. Oh no!! Forgot my keys! If I went to work without them, I wouldn't be able to get into my office, wouldn't be able to collect my notes and books, and therefore wouldn't be able to teach my class.

So I turned right into the next street so that I could turn the car back round to go home for the keys. But as I was performing my three-point turn, I felt my pocket again and hey presto I could feel the metallic lump that was my bunch of keys. Perhaps my gut had disguised them the first time. So I now had to perform another turn so that I could go back the other way again, towards the road and back to work.

Anyone witnessing this event would have seen a door-wide Mat Salleh driving a Matrix round and round in circles at the entrance to the street, apparently without any reason, and then driving off in a huff, swearing bitterly. Not a very good PR image, I am thinking!

And the humiliation did not end there, because that evening, as we were preparing to go out to dinner, I couldn't find my bunch of keys again! I searched high and low: my pockets, the drawer, my wife's drawer, and in the end I found them in a place I could have sworn I didn't leave them, namely my briefcase. A second Senior Moment in the same day, and focused on the same object!

Some people believe in faeries - those invisible little people with wings who go around causing mischief everywhere like moving your razor blades or putting things where you didn't leave them or whatever.

Maybe my Senior Moments were caused by faeries. I must admit, it sounds a lot better than simply going Ga-Ga!