Midlifing

310: Growing Like Gremlins

• Midlifing • Episode 310

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Simon is back from a weekend of hedge laying that turned out to be mostly a fight with brambles, and the two compare notes on the favours their past selves do, or fail to do, for their future selves. The main event is a New Zealand high school reunion WhatsApp group. A haka video turns into a bit of a pile-on against an absent former classmate, and Simon, who was himself bullied out of a school as a boy, asks whether anyone should be defined by who they were as a teenager. Lee would never consider going to a reunion, and makes the case for not looking back at all.

Mentioned

  • Elon Musk – a passing joke about planting a data centre where the trees used to be; the name is unclear in the transcript
  • Hedge laying – traditional method of cutting and bending trees along a hedge line to rebuild it; the weekend's task, which mostly became clearing bramble
  • University Challenge – UK quiz show; a joking frame for asking whether the working week has been "won"
  • Gremlins (1984 film) – used to describe a job that keeps multiplying; prompts an attempt to remember the rules about water and feeding after midnight
  • The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells's novel, and the 2005 Tom Cruise film; brought up for its aliens being killed by something small and ordinary (bacteria), which turns into a fart joke
  • Coventry – setting for an imagined running blog by an office colleague about a farting centre director
  • Haka – Māori challenge performed by a whole school to see off its final-year students; discussed as having become far more serious, skilled and culturally grounded in New Zealand schools over the last 40 years
  • Māori culture – context for how the haka is now taught and performed in schools
  • WhatsApp – the high school reunion group chat where the pile-on happens; also a PhD students' group chat proposed in a work meeting, which got groans

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H.L.I.T: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29311691@N05/8571921679 (CC BY 2.0)