No longer young.

My young person's railcard ran out yesterday. Like, forever. Last year I renewed the thing on my last day of being 25 and tomorrow I turn 27 (just thought I'd drop that in there). It's like I have now officially become old. I am no longer deemed by society to be either young or deserving of an arbitrary 33% discount on frankly extortionate rail fares.

I imagine following the passing of my YPC, as it was affectionately known, I am fairly certain never to get the train again unless someone else is paying. All the crap you have to put up with and it's still more expensive and significantly less convenient than taking your own car.

I'm definitely fortunate now to be driving professionally, especially seeing as I love doing it so much. Perhaps there are people out there, train journalists, who feel just as passionately about sitting on smelly chairs and being kept waiting outside stations for hours at a time and they're perfectly happy to spend a hundred quid doing it, I don't know.

It's really the 27 thing that preoccupies my mind, I think. This pre-life crisis has been going on for a number of years now because I feel so old and unaccomplished. My strategy is to approach careers like journalism and politics that positively reward being old and wise. I can't really do anything about the being old, but at least I feel like I'm making a step towards being accomplished at last.

And oh yes, that reminds me - I'm in Italy, but you can read about that here.