Issue #71: Do hobbies have an expiry date?

Plus, confessions of an underage aunt.

I’m currently in that pre-holiday stage of working through the contents of my fridge-freezer before I head off to Lisbon next week. Breakfast could be either be a spicy tuna sandwich (I’m always trying to recreate the £7.50 Joe & the Juice classic), the leftovers of a family-sized tub of M&S vanilla bean yoghurt or defrosted shepherd’s pie.* The possibilities are both endless and, inevitably, very weird.

Putting aside that train crash of a breakfast, life is good. I wrote a new piece for The Times that I’m proud of, on designing an ADHD-friendly home (I don’t have ADHD, although I’ve secretly self-diagnosed like the rest of my Millennial pals).

My two takeaways, for what it’s worth:

1. Environments designed for neurodiversity are beneficial for everyone e.g. uncluttered spaces, good lighting, a consideration of colour psychology (the subject of another piece I’m writing).

2. We live in an attention-challenging world. Breaking news updates. Lime and Uber scooters whizzing past. Phone notifications set on loud. ADHD or otherwise, we could all do with ways to make our environments – particularly the ones we control – feel safer, quieter and less overwhelming.

* I went for the tuna sandwich. Maybe 50% as good as Joe & the Juice.

Help! I think my hobbies expired

I have been ghosting, or at least flaking on, some of my hobbies lately. My Spanish had received, let’s just say, nada attention over the past couple of months (every time I admit that, I visualise the poor Duolingo owl flying around with a broken wing). I’ve been scared off the tougher classes at my yoga studio, ever since an Ashtanga session where I had to do 101 downward dogs in 75 minutes. To compensate, I have, as my friend Katie joked last week, spoken an inordinate amount about the singular ParkRun I attended a few weeks back.

Updating my CV (or resumé, for my non-Brits) recently, I had a pang of guilt at seeing Spanish and yoga listed – like I hadn’t paid my membership fee and was sneaking in via the back entrance. Was it still valid to claim these things were my hobbies? It makes me think of that line in Diablo Cody’s 2007 movie, Juno:

Uhhh, I hate it when adults use the term "sexually active." What does it even mean? Am I gonna like deactivate some day or is it a permanent state of being?

The thing is, there’s a totally legitimate reason why some of my hobbies have taken a backseat: