So I’ve been walking through Solihull’s Mell Square and abruptly notice that I’m on a street where my mom once worked in a pub. I’m trying to work out where the pub was, since everything’s changed and what I think is the right place is now a tea and cake shop.

There’s also a McDonald’s where I once sat with an extremely nervous stomach because I was an hour early for my first day writing for McDonnell Douglas. That hasn’t changed, but it doesn’t have the stopping power that the memory of my mother does.

But still, the whole street was familiar enough that I really did come to an actual stop. I like to think that I’m aware enough of my surroundings that I never just halt, I never make people behind me have to dodge around to the side. This time I did, this time the realisation of where I was halted me.

Only, I also then realised that nobody noticed. It’s not like I think anyone should, but you know if you stand still in a shopping area you’re going to get approached by sales people or fundraisers. And there were plenty of them around, they just entirely ignored me.

When you’re even ignored by religious groups with megaphones in their hand and no possible chance of luck in their day, something has happened. You’ve crossed a line somewhere.

You’ve become a woman over 30.

Speaking of women, a teenage one just tried to walk straight through me. Now it was my turn to dodge but she didn’t notice and somehow that seemed even stranger. I truly do not expect to be noticed but I’m a man, she’s a woman and while this should not be true, it is: women have to have built-in threat assessment skills. Hopefully she does, and of course it’s good that she recognised I’m not a problem, but out of the 1 to 5 DEFCON ratings available, she put me somewhere around the same level as a glass door.

I can’t be unhappy about that, but I am. I can’t be unhappy that sales assistants ignore me when I walk into stores now. I don’t know whether I am.

Although maybe I exude something, maybe the religious groups can detect an atheist at a hundred paces. And maybe Apple Store staff eyeballed me instantaneously because they could smell a potential sale.

But, actually, give them credit twice over. Not only did they not ignore me, but the staff member I asked about keyboards for iPads, got out her phone and showed me the Amazon listing for the non-Apple one she’d bought herself.

On and off, I may have spent an hour with her as I tried out some things and she got different experts over to help me. In the two main cases, those experts eventually figured out that the reason I couldn’t do something was that the iPad didn’t do it.

I’d feel good about that. I like a tiny, tiny reputation I have in very, very small circles about being able to find the limits of things being tested. And here I was, immediately pushing at the edges of what the Final Cut Pro video editing app and the Logic Pro audio editing app can do.

Except it really was about an hour I spent there. I found out every detail about the main woman’s university course that it was conversationally polite to find out. I asked her technical questions that I think she enjoyed answering — and seemed to clearly enjoy that I genuinely didn’t know and so was paying full attention.

Only, at the end of the hour, I shook her hand and I vow to you she had not thin clue who in the hell I was.

I should’ve nicked an iPad and seen what happened.