It was my birthday last weekend. I'm not publicly announcing the fact because I didn't get enough cards and am hoping for a glut of belated greetings.

Quite the opposite, in fact. I would have been quite happy for the day to pass without the slightest reference to it, and you'll notice I have written "it was" my birthday, not "I celebrated" my birthday.

No, I simply wanted to relay how I felt as I turned 37 - compared with 27, and (if I can remember that far back), 17.

Thirty-six was bad enough. I used to work for a market research company and clearly recall the age ranges of our so-called respondents: 18-24, 24-35, 35+.

I remember not long after my birthday I was asked to fill in a questionnaire and was visibly distraught when confronted with those same categories. Was I really that old? I was content in my teens, and loved being 20-something - but I seem to have suddenly leapt from my twenties to late thirties and don't know what happened to those years in-between.

As bright young things birthdays are brilliant - an excuse to go out and have one too many with friends, to go out shopping with your birthday money and generally have a good time.

But as those years pass we just don't want to know. "Happy Birthday" chanted my husband, who can afford to be smug being two whole years younger.

He tried to instil some enthusiasm by looking in the paper to see which celebrities shared my big day. But even that was a let-down. John Lydon - aka Johnny Rotten - served to remind me of how old I was (as an 18-year-old with a punk boyfriend I went to see the Sex Pistols). Jean Simmons (was she really only 69 - I'm not far off). Then there was Queen Beatrix, of the Netherlands, racing driver Michael Schumacher, plus a host of people I hadn't heard of. The only name with any sort of feel-good factor was the irrepressible Joan Collins - but it turned out I'd misheard and it was in fact John Collins, footballer.

My mother kindly had kindly baked me a cake, and had spared my feelings by placing only one candle in it. I thought about wishing I was ten years younger as I used all my available puff (I'd just been to answer the door and was visibly out of breath) to blow it out. But knowing that prayer could never be answered I wished I could shop in Miss Selfridge without people thinking I'm there as someone's mother.

To many, 30 is a major turning point. And in some ways it was for me, as I got my first job in journalism. For the bulk of my twenties, my "career plan" entailed sitting around with friends drinking tea and planning how we would make a million without getting a job. We were hard up - but it was fun.

Now things have changed. I'm married, with a family, a mortgage and a 35+ chip on my shoulder.

I'm clinging to the hope that, as they say, "Life begins at 40". Maybe then I'll throw caution to the wind, dash out to Miss Selfridge, buy myself a black lycra number (assuming they do size 20) and party.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.