A few weekends ago I found myself sitting at my dining table with a collection of vintage medicine bottles, a stack of Agatha Christie novels and a notebook full of references to poisoning murders. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like to fully embrace middle age, I can confirm that it looks a lot like this.
The bottles had come from various charity shops and antique centres. My mission was to identify poisons that featured in Agatha Christie novels and create little labels for each bottle, noting the book, the victim and, where possible, a brief description of how the poison worked.
I appreciate that this may not be everyone’s idea of a relaxing Sunday afternoon. It’s certainly not what I imagined I’d be doing when I was twenty. Back then I assumed adulthood would involve becoming increasingly sophisticated. I pictured dinner parties, interesting conversations and perhaps owning matching towels.
Instead, I have reached the age of 48 and spend my spare time researching strychnine.
The thing is though, I absolutely loved it.
There was something deeply satisfying about disappearing down rabbit holes, learning obscure facts and creating a collection that existed for no purpose whatsoever other than making me happy. Nobody had asked me to do it. There was no deadline. There wasn’t even really an end goal beyond being able to look at my shelf and think, “That’s quite cool.”
As adults, I think we often forget how valuable that sort of thing can be.
Children are encouraged to have hobbies. We buy them craft kits, football boots and musical instruments. We happily spend entire weekends ferrying them between clubs and activities because we understand instinctively that hobbies are good for them. They build confidence, develop skills and provide opportunities to make friends.
Somewhere along the line though, many of us stop extending the same logic to ourselves. Every spare hour starts to feel as though it should be productive. We should be working, exercising, decluttering, meal planning, side hustling or at the very least doing something that can be justified as useful. The idea of spending three hours reading about Victorian poisons can start to feel vaguely irresponsible.
And yet I suspect it’s exactly the opposite.
One of the things I love most about hobbies is that they remind us that we’re more than our responsibilities. So much of adult life is spent looking after other people, meeting obligations and ticking things off lists that it’s easy to lose sight of the things that genuinely spark our curiosity.
When somebody asks what you’re interested in, it’s surprisingly difficult to answer if your entire existence revolves around work and life admin. A hobby doesn’t have to be impressive. In fact, the more niche and peculiar it is, the better. I have friends who keep bees. I know people who knit tiny outfits for dogs. One friend spends her evenings tracing her family tree and can now tell you alarming amounts about distant relatives who lived in Somerset in the eighteenth century.
Over Christmas I became mildly obsessed with miniature room crafts and kept going to the garden centre to look at the Rolife DIY craft kits. I can’t claim it as a full-blown hobby yet, but I can see how people end up spending entire weekends making tiny armchairs and microscopic potted plants. There is something wonderfully freeing about allowing yourself to become interested in things simply because they interest you.
Not because they’ll advance your career. Not because they’ll make you fitter. Not because they’ll save money or improve your productivity. Just because they’re fun.
I think that’s particularly important as we get older. There can be a temptation to become narrower, sticking only to the things we’re already good at. Hobbies push back against that. They encourage curiosity. They give us new things to learn and talk about. They make life feel bigger. And sometimes they leave you with a shelf full of poison bottles that make visitors slightly nervous. Which, if you ask me, is no bad thing.
So if you’ve been wondering whether you’re too old to start something new, whether that’s pottery, birdwatching, watercolours, genealogy, miniature rooms or collecting obscure facts about toxic substances, this is your permission slip.
You don’t need to be good at it. You don’t need to make money from it. You don’t need to justify it to anyone.You just need to enjoy it.
That’s reason enough.