30. Rhymes with 'flirty'. Doesn't rhyme with 'oh fuck'. Odd.

I guess posting an 'oh holy mother of God I'm nearly 30!' discourse would be tedious and predictable? Well tough - for someone who leaps on every opportunity to obssess and fret and worry, the lure is just too great.

I was looking forward to turning 30 in that weird, sick way. You know, the way you look forward to getting a bad stomach bug because of the effort-free weight loss, or a big operation because of all the attention and presents. The odd thing is, although I feel compelled to have the obligatory crisis I just can't seem to muster up the requisite hysteria. It's quite annoying really; this is the man that spent the two months before turning 25 in a tear-streaked diva-strop and STILL gets emotional when the poor, white trash contestant on 'Wheel of Fortune' wins the jackpot. Hell, I even shed a tear when 'Steps' broke up. So surely turning 30 should be a perfect excuse to exercise my inner drama queen?

Previously at times of great crisis - relationship break-ups, hair straighteners on the blink, running out of wine at 11.05pm on a Monday night - said drama queen didn't so much get exercised as thrown on the treadmill at full speed on a 45-degree incline until she screamed. So why, in the final moments before such a monumental occassion, hasn't she appeared? There's n'ery a Gucci running shoe or a Prada sweat-towell in sight. Have I really changed that much? Perhaps my need to obssess at such a major occurence has been tempered by the fact that my husband is 43 and looks fantastic, thus negating the commonly-held belief that it all goes wrong as you get older. Or perhaps it's because my closest friends have already leaped this hurdle - and done it gracefully, without dissolving into fits of woe and self-pity. Maybe that last point is complete bollocks and it's just that I couldn't hear their anguished cries from 5,000 miles away...

Or - and here's a scary thought - perhaps I have come to realise that even though there are a million things in this world worth being upset about, getting a little older isn't one of them.

Or perhaps this is normal denial and at the stroke of midnight on June 12th I'll find myself drunk on the sofa in my underwaer, eating two litres of Ben and Jerry's straight from the tub because lets-face-who-cares-I'm-old-and-hideous-and-what's-the-point-anyway?

Stay tuned folks - we'll be right back after these messages...