As we get older, sometimes we approach the next stage of our lives with grace and dignity. We know it is coming, and we embrace it with a calm sense of welcoming. We see the opportunities it brings and understand that these, in some way, outweigh the negatives. I always think Scandinavians are good at this. Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes, in my humble opinion, age so gracefully and with style. Both guys and girls. Now, while one of my passports says that I am very much Swedish, I have to confess that I don’t think I have fully appreciated that I am nearly fifty and not quite the flexible, strong, athletic and humble young man I once was. But, as I was getting myself ready for the golf season here last week, it hit me. Hard. I am now middle aged.

Now for many, the self realisation that you are middle aged comes in different ways. If you have been sporty, you lose the speed or some strength, you find it harder to get yourself into the gym or to pull the trainers on to try to jog, stumble, or wobble (delete as appropriate). For others, you notice that you are not quite as sharp mentally; it takes you a little longer to complete some of those cognitive tasks, or to remember something that you think would have been easy a few years earlier. For me, I have experienced all of those things. But none of them really indicated to me that I was approaching middle age. No. For me, it hit me hard at a totally different time. In the golf shop.

I have always loved golf shopping. Now in the days of internet shopping, much of my perusing, like many of my fellow golfers around the world, I imagine is done on our computers at work (during our designated breaks of course …), or on our mobile phones while we are sitting on the toilet. Don’t turn your nose up. You know it's true. But I also have to confess that I love going into a real golf shop. In fact, I love going anywhere where I might be able to look at golf things, regardless of how good or bad they might be. Charity shops, where there might be a few odd golf clubs that I will never actually use or need, but might buy anyway. General sports shops, where I might pick up a bag of lake golf balls, none of which I would ever really choose to buy new, but for some reason they seem appealing in a blue, plastic, see through bag. Or specialist golf shops, where, well, I could basically blow my salary in less than thirty minutes.

Now in Sweden, and across Scandinavia, the big golf retailer that dominates the market is Dormy. Dormy is pretty cool (and this is not an article sponsored by them - yet). They have pretty much everything you could want from a golf perspective and they hold a place in my heart because my son spent two weeks doing work experience in our local store and they made him really welcome, even though at the time he was painfully shy. It was in Dormy a couple of weeks ago that it hit me that I was no longer a young golfer, and in reality, I am turning into all the blokes I used to play golf with twenty years ago when I was in a few golf societies with the older guys I worked with. Now, while I am able to write about it with my tongue in my cheek and not take it too seriously, I will confess that, at the time, it did hit me a little harder than I would have expected.

In my younger years, I was very much into golf technology. I have a degree in sports science, so the idea of small improvements in equipment making a difference to your performance was always something that I found interesting. Every year, while I didn’t always buy the latest gear, I would be in the shop, looking over every new driver development, new sets of irons, and thinking about golf balls and compression rates. I could spend hours, to the derision of my kids, looking at the same stuff that I very rarely bought. Luckily, my kids both became better putters because they were able to get some practice on the in-store greens while I was manhandling the store's merchandise. However, this year, on my third visit to the shop, it hit me. I hadn’t even touched a driver; looked at golf ball packaging, or pulled an iron from a rack and pretended to play a delicate little chip. I had spent all my time looking at … bags and shoes.

For the last three weeks, my focus in the store was now about comfort. When I went in, instead of heading into the middle of our local store, where the clubs are, I headed to the left, and went straight to the shoes. In the past, I would have looked at what I thought looked good; thought about were they cool enough to match the clothes I was wearing, and just got them. Now, things have changed. Without realising, I was picking shoes up that actually looked like shoes rather than trainers, feeling the inside, he shaping of the back of the heel, and the strength of the sides. Even worse; I was trying multiple pairs on. Of course, indirectly I was looking at performance, but in reality, what I was really thinking was, can I wear these things for four or five hours and still feel like I have had slippers on. I was shopping for comfort. Nothing else. Damn.

If I am being honest; that is not the worst of it. The shoe section has become my second favourite part of the shop. Where I am most at home, it pains me to say, is the bag section. I fear I have become a golf bag fetishist. By far now my favourite section in Dormy is the bag section. Now, rather than looking at the newest drivers, the different shaft and grip combinations, and the level of modification possible in the head, I look at, and try on, golf bags. Yes. Its not just about how much stuff I can get in, which it used to be. How many pockets? How large are they? Is it waterproof? How well does it stand? No, the process involved me getting bags down off the shelves and hangers, and trying them on. Feeling how they sit on my back. Wondering if the balance will shift with a full set of clubs in. Worst of all, standing in front of a mirror checking out how I looked carrying it. That was the moment. Staring at my own reflection, in a full length mirror, seeing if the Big Max bag I desperately wanted (but in a different colour combination), suited me. Double damn.

It was at that moment I realised, not that I was middle aged, but that I was old. Golf, the sport I love and still want to be pretty good at, had been reduced to a situation where my aim was simply to be as comfortable as possible. The game hasn’t changed, but I clearly have.