thirty-one

I turned thirty-one this week.

I really did not feel good about turning thirty last year, a panic which in retrospect was almost entirely born out of worrying that the government might suddenly announce some kind of European freedom of movement plan for ‘young’ people, right as I aged out of it. Obviously, I needn’t have worried. And obviously, turning thirty was actually fine. Nice, even. I had a birthday picnic on the heath and lots of people came; my family and my partner made a soothing kind of fuss of me; a close friend and I treated ourselves to an elaborate dinner at St. John. I started to feel a bit silly about having got so worked up about it all.

The strangest thing, I think, about being in your early thirties, is that you have crossed a threshold - whether or not you feel that you have. It’s there in the little things: a new age category at parkrun; targeted ads for collagen; no longer being eligible for a railcard (although I highly recommend finding yourself a train driver partner with generous staff discounts to solve that problem). It was bizarre to me, to realise that I was no longer perceived as ‘young’, however bambi-like and unprepared for the world I sensed myself to be. (No, I wanted to shout into the void, it’s all a mistake! I don’t understand interest rates yet! My acne hasn’t cleared up! I still haven’t driven on the motorway!)

But then, of course, your peers start showing you just how grown up they are: that you might not feel you’ve moved up a category, but they certainly have. This year, I have toasted friends as they promise to spend their lives together; attended dinner parties in newly-purchased homes with kitchens larger than my whole flat and mortgages ten times bigger than mine; cooed at friends’ pregnancy scans and held friends’ babies in my arms. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise: as an August birthday, always the youngest in my year, I’ve had a long time to get used to friends doing things before me.

Anyway, I really didn’t want to overthink turning thirty-one. I had a lovely few days, in a very low-key kind of way: cake and fizz and dinner in my parents’ garden; a delicious but not-fancy meal with my partner; a day off work. Easy and breezy. I did my best to ignore the nagging awareness of one little thing: there was a reason why thirty-one sounded so horribly old and responsible to me. My parents were thirty-one when I was born. My mum, on her thirty-first birthday, was four months pregnant, just beginning to show. This was it, then: the moment that our lives diverged.

But was it? What about when my parents were twenty-nine and got married - and I, at twenty-nine, did not? Or when they were twenty-six, and bought a terraced house with three bedrooms and a garden, while I, aged twenty-six, rented a tiny flat with walls so thin we could hear the neighbour’s hourly attempts to cough up phlegm? Or perhaps when my parents were born in the 1960s, and I had the very different fate of arriving thirty (one) years later?

Or - perhaps - I was being hard on myself. I forced myself to think of all the things I had done in my first thirty-one years. Neither of my parents had ever run a marathon, or played a sonata, or learned three foreign languages. Neither of my parents had ever acquired a book, in English or translation. (Hey - neither of my parents had ever been on Substack!). Maybe, just maybe, it was ok for our lives to be, in some but not all ways, diverging.

I had an idea that I was going to write a list. (Of course I was going to write a list!). Thirty-one things for my year as a thirty-one-year-old. The first ideas came relatively easily: get better at Swedish. Learn more of Chopin’s Impromptus. Run another marathon (and run it faster). And then I got stuck. There are things, of course, which I would love desperately to attain and which would change my life hugely and for the better - European citizenship; a magic cure for cystic acne; a winning lottery ticket and the Islington townhouse with a garden I’d buy with it - but they are all helplessly outside of my control. The other things, though, have something important in common. I just want to do more of what I’m doing already.

So there it is, my newly-formed wisdom, sourced from a well of maturity I didn’t know I had. The birthday is over: the cake has been eaten, the presents put away. In a few weeks, I will take the cards down from the mantelpiece and tuck them in a drawer. And as September approaches, I will throw myself into preparing for a much bigger party: our wedding. That is, after all, the sort of thing people do in their thirties. And a few weeks after that, it will all be over, and I will be getting used to married life. (While also improving my Swedish and practising my Chopin and running even more laps of the heath, obviously).

Really, the main thing I want to accomplish by my next birthday is to be so genuinely unbothered by it that I don’t even attempt to write about it.

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