Or, 5 steps to make yourself feel middle-aged:

1.  Take impossibly glamorous 12-year old daughter clothes shopping.  Hear your mother’s voice coming out of your mouth as you  ask if it’s big enough/long enough/warm enough/waterproof enough and with enough pockets to be worth buying?

2.  Remember with a pang exactly how those questions made you feel when you were that age (if not – ever – that glamorous), and know you should save your breath.

3. Watch the pity in her eyes as she  answers, politely, that it’s fine.  Know that it could be tight enough to cut off circulation and flimsy enough to disintegrate in a thick fog but she’d still want you to buy it.

4.  Realise that the chap on the cash desk who was flirting outrageously with the leggy 19-year olds in front is calling you Madam.

5.  Pay up like a lamb.  Go home.  Water tomatoes.