Do I Look Old to Young People?

I saw a piece the other day about a book called Amortality. In Ye Olden Dayes, you were a kid, then (if it was the '50s or later), you were a teenager for a bit. Then you got married in your early 20s and the minute you had your first child, you turned into your mum by cutting your hair off into a sensible bob and dressing in Laura Ashley. You kept house and raised kids (possibly with a part-time job thrown in) for the next 20 years or so, and then you started encouraging your children to 'give you grandchildren' and keep the whole treadmill of ageing moving seamlessly along. You knew where you were, and what to wear while you were there.

But now, as Amortality points out, it's different. You can resist growing up pretty much forever, if you care little enough about what other people think (I'm pointing a finger at you, Madonna, going out with men who are barely older than your eldest child). I quite like this; I don't feel appreciably different from how I did a decade ago (other than being bitter about the fact that, once I bought a flat, house prices bucked the trend of the preceding 15 years or so, and plummeted, thus ruining my Sarah Beeny-fuelled fantasies of making a killing through tarting up an unloved one-bed flat in Streatham, which turned out not to be 'on the up' once the recession hit and the idea of turning Caesar's 'nite'club into an M&S Simply Food was demonstrably ludicrous).

However, it is an increasing challenge to resist feeling older. These are the things that are currently reminding me that I'm no longer 30:
1/ I remember watching Charles and Diana's wedding. The fact that their son has now got married makes me feel ancient. As did the fact that Princess Beatrice's hilarious wedding hat had its own Facebook hate page and Pippa Middleton's satin-clad bottom nearly caused Twitter to melt. D'you think the Twitchfork mobs would've actually risen up and demanded that the Wedding of the Decade didn't go ahead after Charles's infamous, 'Whatever love means' engagement interview, if Twitter had existed in the 80s? Could've saved everyone a lot of time and trouble.
2/ My flat has moths. Nothing is designed to make you feel old ladyish like having all your clothes stinking of lavender in an attempt to ward off the little fuckers. I keep catching sight of silvery glints as they flutter around the place. Why are there still so many of them, when I have turned the flat into a veritable moth mausoleum by twatting them with a magazine whenever I find one?
3/ My eyelids have gone crepey. No-one tells you this will happen. It happens overnight. (About a year ago, in my case). You wander around the place, oblivious - you put on eyeshadow every day, onto your fabulous, firm eyelids. On it goes, smoothly. Easy to blend,a matter of moments and bingo, you're done. Yes, it might crease a bit by the end of the day, but hey, you can just put on a bit more if you're going out somewhere. Then, one day, there's a weird little fold there. 'I must be tired, or dehydrated', I thought. 'I'm sure it'll be gone soon, and then my eyelids will be back how they were'. I bought pricier eye cream and actually applied it, having never paid that much attention before. But, reader, they did not return to how they were. Little folds appeared on my other eye. Despite shelling out really extraordinary amounts of money on eye cream that promised to 'firm and lift' my upper eyelid (the beauty industry is adept at finding smaller and ever more defined areas for which to flog you creams and unctions), my eyelids remain crepey. Now, crows' feet I expected. I'm not massively happy about having them, but you can at least play the 'a life lived for laughs' card with them. But crepey eyelids are a massive bore. It takes ages to blend eyeshadow (and blending it makes you feel as though you're making your eyelids even worse by dragging a variety of brushes all over them); you can no longer wear anything sparkly round your eyes (the sparkly bits get stuck in the cracks and then highlight them) and you feel like propping them back where they used to be with matchsticks. Girls, appreciate the fact that you don't have crepey eyelids every day from now on. And get with some pricey eyecreams. I'm now thanking God daily for the fact that my neck isn't yet showing signs of decrepitude. And contemplating an eye serum that costs an astonishing £80. On the plus side, it would get me an absolute shitload of Boots Advantage Card points.
4/ My gums are shot to shit. In my early 20s, I had serious gum disease diagnosed. I spent about 18 months having a ton of work done at Eastman's, a specialist dental hospital in Kings Cross. It was pretty unpleasant, but at least it was free because I'd been referred there on the NHS. I laboured under the delusion, after it was all done, that I was now Cured. Turns out: not so much. I have a condition that has to be 'managed'. I went to a very nice dentist, who told me I was doing fine every time I saw him. Then, the other week, I thought it was time to get myself a dentist who was actually based in the city in which I live. I was already fairly fazed by the fact that I was in a dentist's chair in what was effectively a massive Georgian drawing room, so it didn't really help when the dentist told me that my mouth was a mess and proceeded to show me photos of my molars, roots cruelly exposed by my treacherous gums. Apparently my aversion to the quotidian boredom of flossing and keeping my teeth clean has come home to roost. I now have to have a consultation with a gum specialist which costs £250 and the resulting treatment to stop my teeth falling out is likely to cost a grand. Christ, is it any wonder that you never feel like you have any more money than you did when you were 25 - what with inflation and the outlay required just to ensure that half your face doesn't fall off, it's a miracle I'm not surviving entirely on baked beans and renting out my spare room to five Australians just for the extra rent.

Eva Wiseman's column in today's Observer offers up a variety of questions occupying her thoughts as a 30 year-old woman. All I can say is, if you're like me, the questions remain exactly the same a decade on (other than the white clothes one - I'll leave that to Liz Hurley, thanks, and the wearing a bra in bed - why would you want to, it's so uncomfortable?):

1. Will I ever feel like a grown-up? Or will I carry on pretending until I have conned even myself?

2. When do you start to get really hairy? Will a day come when a child will point at my beard on the bus?
3. Which of the things I swallowed as a student is going to be the one to give me cancer?
4. Am I too old for band T-shirts? Am I too old for T-shirts?
5. Will I feel jealous seeing people younger than me become successful? How will it feel seeing younger generations become prime ministers and presidents?
6. How fragile are my relationships? Have we passed the point where it's possible to lose touch with friends over an unreturned phone call?
7. How much money am I meant to have saved by now, and when am I meant to spend it?
8. Will the time come when I catch a reflection of myself in a dark tube window and see an old lady? Will I feel any relief?
9. How do you get off with people when you're 30? How do you get off with people when you know what you know, when you've literally vomited from heartbreak, or when you understand yourself well enough to realise you could never have a relationship with this person because the drip drip of snobberies and judgements that you've collected over your life have grown into a tick-list of uncompromiseable necessities that this person could never meet? Plus, they have a weird, spitty mouth?
10. How important is it to own a property, and why? Surely the benefits of having a landlord come and fix your washing machine far outweigh the pleasure of choosing your own kitchen surfaces. No?
11. Is it too late to learn to drive? How about learning a language? Is it too late to start a nightly cleansing routine? Is it just too late?
12. Should I be sleeping in a bra?
13. Were those vile, greasy GCSE years really the best ones of my life?
14. How do you know when's the right time to have a baby?
15. Is everyone I know going to get married? Is everyone I know going to get divorced?
16. Is this the age when I'm meant to buy an expensive handbag?
17. Will a time come when watching the news doesn't feel like homework?
18. Who will I celebrate my 60th birthday with? And where? Will this place always feel like home?
19. If I was going to have plastic surgery, what would I get? And would I attempt to rationalise it? Will I be able to grow fat gracefully?
20. How will I deal with other people's deaths?
21. Things like Twitter, Facebook – when will we get bored of them? Will I be updating my status when I'm 50? What will happen to our blogs when we die?
22. How long have I spent watching puppy, kitten and slow loris videos on YouTube, how long will I spend watching puppy, kitten and slow loris videos on YouTube, and how will this affect me in years to come?
23. Will I ever really understand politics? Is it too late to go back and learn the origins of things like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
24. When will my lack of life skills catch up with me? When will the fact that I can't put up a shelf or confidently rewire a plug lead to my whole world crashing down?
25. Will I regret not staying up to 6am more often in my 20s? Will I come to look back on the nights I stayed in watching telly with shame and sadness?
26. Do I look old to young people?
27. Should I be more ambitious? Or is my lack of ambition really as charming and adorable as I believe it to be?
28. Will I ever have a lifestyle that allows for white clothes?
29. At what age should my parents stop looking after me, and should I start looking after my parents?
30. At 30, am I too old to start again?