I'm 26 today - officially middle-aged.

Today is my birthday. Let joy be unconfined. There won't be a party. Too stressful. The trouble with birthday parties, in my experience, is that you tend to group different friends into different pockets - you have work friends, and college friends, and various groups of random friends you've picked up along the way ... and since they're all quite different, you behave differently with them. I might be a swearing lout with one friend and an urbane sophisticate with another. Mix them all together in the same room and it gives me an identity crisis: suddenly I don't know who I am any more, and I panic and smash chairs against the wall until everyone goes home.

So instead of holding a birthday party, I plan to mark the occasion by screaming and crying. That's what I was doing the day I was born, so it's fitting. And besides, I've got cause for tears: apparently, I'm middle-aged. I'd always assumed middle age began somewhere in your 40s - the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "the period between youth and old age, about 45 to 60" - but today's ruthlessly youth-oriented Reich has shifted the entry point ever closer, while I've grown steadily older to meet it. As I turn 26, I have to accept that I'm yesterday's news.