Bake Off's Sue Perkins has something very profound to say about milestone birthdays

Last week, Sue appeared onthe Homo Sapiens podcast which is a show run by Alan Cumming and Christopher Sweeney for LGBTQ+ people. Sue spoke about her midlife crisis and the immense pressure and anxiety she felt about turning 50.

"Six months before [turning 50] I was almost entirely unbearable. I had a classic, lowest grade, entry-level midlife crisis. I wanted to be somebody who didn’t behave the way everybody else behaved, I wanted to run contrary to the narrative. But now, I just got sucked straight into that."

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She believes we are culturally hardwired to reflect on "the big ones." Sue said the "subconscious cultural pressures to examine birthdays with noughts at the end. We’re just sheep […] we just follow. No matter how counter-cultural and exciting I wish to be…

She also spoke on another important topic and one which is understandably close to her heart. Sheshared the recent experience of confronting somebody over verbal homophobic abuse while walking her dog on Hampstead Heath.

She says she "sort of went right up to him and went, ‘What did you say?’ And he sort of postured a bit almost as if he was going to hit me, almost like an intimation of something physical.”

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It was the shock of it for her which was most scary and stated that it had been many years since she experienced something similar. “When I was growing up, it was just mutterings. It was all quiet and a cultural thing of that’s just not quite right", she said, "you know when something bad happens and on the bus, on the way home you think of all the brilliant things you should have said – in that moment I had that very profoundly."