I suppose, said my mother out of nowhere, that the next time we see you you'll be thirty.

It was quarter to nine on Boxing day morning and I was half asleep against the back window of my parents orange (we like to always know where we've parked it and anyway, the only other choice was green and Simon, you know Simon, Mary from Folkestone's second son, he has a green car and it's horrible) Vauxhall in the car park of a retail park in Kent, waiting for Currys to open so my father could rub himself discreetly against the plasma televisions. I had been silently contemplating all possible shades of meaning behind the Britney Spears perfume that Santa had left under the tree for me not twenty four hours earlier. Would it be worse to think that I had been bad enough to deserve such a thing, or good but considered the kind of person that would wear it?

So intense had been my reverie that my mother interpreted my involuntary yelp at having my thoughts so unexpectedly interrupted as audible umbrage at the thought of growing older, or having been reminded of my advancing age at all. She then set about trying to remedy this with indecent and wholly unrequired haste.

I always think my thirties were the best decade of my life. You're properly grown up and you've left all of that silliness of your twenties behind you. You're all settled down, got a proper job and you know exactly where you're going in life. No surprises, none of this wandering about trying to work new things out. You're old enough to know everything you need to know and you can just stick with what you like.

That's right, said my dad, a man who once, in his twenties, set light to a grand piano and was pushed down the Old Kent Road playing Great Balls of Fire on it. It's a great age to be.

As it turns out, £4.99 electric carving knives from the Currys sale bin are absolutely no good for slitting your wrists at all.