Your 20s are a time of growth. You’re expected to be an adult but not everyone gets there at the same time.
Some people seem to easily stride into maturity, while others stumble clumsily along the way.
If you want to see which of your friends are true adults and which are overgrown children keep an eye out for these tell-tale signs.
1) They Have Clean Mugs With No Brown Rings:
There is no higher sign of refinement than clean, dazzlingly white, pristine mugs. Many people in their 20s have to endure chipped, worn mugs, with stagnant brown rings from cuppas long past festering at the bottom.
Special scorn should be leveled at the charlatan who scoops a pre-used mug out of the sink and rinses it with cold water.
2. They Have A Sugar Bowl:
A piece of crockery dedicated solely to sugar is more grown up than paying taxes and attending your child’s graduation combined. No dipping a bent tea spoon into a battered bag of sugar for you!
If you proffer a selection of sachets surreptitiously stolen from Starbucks to your guests, you are an infant.
3) They Have A Structurally Sound Couch:
When you can offer your guests a symmetrical couch you offer them inspiration to be a better person.
Too many people in their 20s are content to perch upon a misshapen heap of textile, splintered wood, and foam. A half-formed mutant of a thing that slopes wildly to one side and features at least one yawning abyss of an arse dent dragging you into it with gravitational inevitability.
4) You Can See The Surface Of The Coffee Table:
A coffee table with its surface unmarred by the pox of mug rings, with no errant slick of dried in tea, and no dusting of rogue sugar granules. This is the sign of a master of their own destiny.
However, many half-formed child-things who have somehow made it into their third decade have a grotesque, cluttered monstrosity of a table squatting in the middle of their living room like a choleric toad.
5. They have a cat
They can maintain a life? This is a truly monumental achievement.
The fluffy feline that pads around the house, purring beatifically, and leaping lithely up onto your lap is in better shape, and has better prospects for the future than you.
However, a cat can be as much an indictment as it is an endorsement.
If you walk into a house and the first thing you notice is the stink emanating from the burgeoning litter tray you know that these people shouldn’t be in charge of something that needs to be fed.
Occasionally you’ll see it, a mangy, scabrous monstrosity of a cat slinking around in the periphery of your gaze.
You both hate and pity it.
6) They Have Ikea Furniture:
When you walk into a living room and see that it is bedecked with the beautiful, crisp, minimalist furniture of the Scandinavinsa, you know this person has not only been to that fabled store, but has carefully selected furniture for it.
A far cry from the shambolic array of furniture you find in most rentals. Repugnant heaps of upholstery that have seen more strange arses that the number 16 bus.
