I was 29 and needed glasses for the first time and had to stop eating anything sweet at all because it hurt too much and I suddenly realised I was at that peak age maybe day or month where everything was the best it could be and the deterioration was beginning.
Like the summer solstice that comes so soon; I always maintained I'd come of age at 45 in some glorious Nigella Lawson-esq manner and was holding off until then. But really, it would be all downhill from here.
The hangovers that used to be fine excuses to do nothing but now filled me with dread, realising all of those hours that go to waste just to feel a bit like Better Me for an evening.
I explained to my Mum that I made a new girl gang during the press trip and how great it was they found me funny.
I said I thought maybe my usual friends were already funny and I hadn't realised.
"All your friends *are* funny" my Mum replied.
"No I don't mean funny-strange I mean funny-haha and all *your* friends are funny-strange by the way."
I didn't want to tell her that I was lucky to have the friends I did have left because everyone you once cared for has left London by the time you're 29.
That it had become one city-wide game of musical chairs, for the good jobs and the good partners. Apart from I crucially wanted to stay nice and leave one day - a deal London wasnt going to sign off on easily.
Fleeing friends are just one part of that bargain.
The rest is wondering if your hair used to fall out at this rate five years ago while you stand in someone's armpit on the Victoria line home for the night, too tired to go for those drinks that were arranged three weeks ago.
They’ll get re-arranged, pushed back in the diary, like the escape plan you once had for Glasgow and Manchester and Margate and Anywhere But Here, or - worse: back to the place you left at 18 that somehow feels welcoming again.
I used to think someone would come and tell me I had made the right decision with it all.
Then one summer’s day I realised I could still count how many babies I’d held in my 20s (four) and that my time on this unfathomably long business trip was coming to an end.
There was an end in sight, at least.
What did get used up in those eight intervening years to make those night buses and strip-light-lit bagel shops and club toilet cubicles suddenly unappealing?
What’ll get used up in the next eight?
And dear god how crazy will the countryside make us or is it okay now we’re old?