When do birthdays lose appeal?

In case anyone’s wondering, yes, my bloke’s dreaded 50th birthday actually happened. And this got me thinking back to a time when birthdays were wonderful things, to childhood, when we gave our ages in halves and quarters, and each milestone was eagerly anticipated.

After all, it was an entire day dedicated to celebrating you, only you, and there was cake, people sang and gave you gifts, you took cupcakes to school, and you chose what was for dinner that night – sausages! – because for one perfect day the world did actually revolve around you.

So when did the joy end? When did an invitation to a birthday party become something greeted with a groan, not a cheer?

At what point did we stop looking forward to our birthdays and start staring them down with trepidation instead?

I remember keenly the first time I felt the pressure of the hand of time upon my shoulder.

I was nine, turning 10 the next day, and I lay in my sleeping bag on a camping trip listening to the deep breathing of my family around me, while silent tears slipped from the corners of my eyes, for never again would I be in single figures. I knew at 10 I was leaving my childhood behind me.

It was also the birthday when I got Nintendo Donkey Kong, so I soon recovered from my midnight melancholy.

I think the teenage years were okay: at 13 you’re defiantly not a child; at 16 you can, theoretically, have sex; at 18 you can drink – though you probably have been for a few years – and vote; and at 21 you’re definitely an adult and no one can argue otherwise.

So is it 25 perhaps – a quarter of a century, when you realise you’re halfway to 50 but still feel like you haven’t started?

Or 36, when it dawns on you that it’s now half a lifetime since you left school?

Or 40, which you know you considered ancient as a child?

Or is it when you turn 50, like Himself, when you find yourself in a lovely hotel, and you’ve been swimming and horse-riding, and you’ve had so much cake and opened so many presents, and you’re surrounded by the folk who love you best, and there are messages from all the rest?

And you decide, finally, to leave all that youthful fretting in the past, and let birthdays be wonderful things again.