I am currently 33 years old. "Only" 33. My 87 year old Nan would most likely give anything to be "only 33". But the thing is, no matter how many times older people say "you don't know how lucky you are...wait until you're 42/56/69/74/88/91/105" (delete as applicable), "only 33" is still the oldest I've ever been (though hopefully not as old as I'll ever be).
When I was 18 I had an assistant's job at a local radio station. My boss was 33, and I thought she was ancient. I remember feeling a bit sorry for her; surely most of her life had already happened; certainly her youth definitely had? It hadn't, obviously, but 'youth' in your thirties is very different from 'youth' in your twenties. Mainly because when you're in your twenties you're not actually aware of being young in the first place. All that really matters is what's going on today. I remember sitting in the pub with a bottle of Two Dogs (!) and a friend, both of us having just turned 21 and moaning about the lack of places to go on Saturday nights (nobody does misplaced angst quite as well as a twentysomething in the pub).
You're aware of being young in your thirties, though. In fact you're constantly reassuring yourself and others in the same boat that "we're still young". And you are, but it's a different sort of young. It's young with the looming threat of self-awareness. It's young with the knowledge that soon you definitely won't be young any more, so you'd better do something with said youth before it crumbles away into submission and you end up wandering into M&S in a trance and buying a pair of tartan slippers just because they look comfy.
It's youth with added nostalgia. Nostalgia doesn't hit you properly until after you hit thirty; before then you can listen to a song from your childhood and half-heartedly think "that was a long time ago" with no real concept of how fast time actually moves. Now there are songs that are verging on physically painful for me to listen to as I start to understand how fast time actually does move; how I've started to build a bank of dust-covered memories, seemingly without even realising it, that can actually reach out its wispy fingers over the best part of twenty-five years. I've known my two best friends for twenty-three years. That fact alone scares the willies out of me, because it really, really doesn't seem like it.
There's no use telling people in their twenties about these new-found revelations though, because they won't understand; they'll think you're moaning about nothing, and anyway to them you ARE old so what's the problem? And you can't tell people older than you because they'll look smugly down on you for only just realising something that's been with them for many, many years and then they'll look at you with their eyes coated in a gleamy self-satisfied glaze that says "finally...welcome to my world". Maybe that's one of the good things about the 'slippery slope'; the day that other, younger, people realise they've joined you on it.
All I can say is, I'm looking forward to the day my twenty-one year old sister turns thirty (insert smiley here).
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