Because I am well over 50 myself, the thought of the half century doesn't either impress me or terrify me. It was a wonderful occasion some years back when, with another 50-year-old friend, we had 50 women to lunch and a lot of song and drink. But like buses coming together, an awful lot of people and things seem to be turning 50 this year, with all the celebration, concealment and wonder that being half of a hundred always involves.
There's this man in London who I know slightly, and he works in the posh end of the confectionery trade. And he once told me that he was born in July 1948 on the day that bread rationing ended in Britain and there were such huge celebrations in his family because of the bread liberation thing that he had a christening like no child had ever known.
Of course I remember things like this, because I had a sort of vision of the Christening party with them all stuffing themselves with bread and butter, and didn't I say it to him this year in London. Something like, he must be looking forward to his 50th and wondering would he have olive breads and carrot breads and marvellous things like that to celebrate. Like all of us who talk a lot and are used to cheerful remarks being the very wrong thing to say, I know how to recognise a sentence to sink so heavily.
His face was ashen. By what calculation had I worked this out? he asked through clenched teeth.
He was 38 years old, he was tanned, he was fit, he was much in the gossip columns and most importantly, he was in a new relationship.
I apologised deeply. I told him I was so old and mad nowadays that I was easily confused. I agreed that the best policy about almost everything nowadays was reticence. And I went away sadly and wondered why, minutes earlier, I had been congratulating myself on the living brain cells that did remain and had brought such an innocent piece of information so wrongly to the forefront of my brain. Then I remembered that Prince Charles was born in 1948 but unlike Mr Let's Pretend from the confectionery trade he will not be able to hide it. Already he will be preparing to face millions of words in tabloid newsprint about . . . Charles at a crossroads; Whither the Prince of Wales? and What he should do now? Does the spirit of Diana wish him well? Will Camilla forgive him for not marrying her? And when he does turn 50 later this year and all this endless speculation begins, it's honestly going to be one of the few times in my life I will ever feel sorry for the fellow, and will wish he could have a nice half century like the rest of us did.
And there's a woman I know in America who is going to be 50 this month. She's the best of fun and so is her man, but there will be no razzmatazz party because her husband thinks she is 47.
I know, I know.
Two simple questions: What does it matter? And how does she keep hiding it?
The answers are: a) his first marriage failed because she was an Older Woman, so she had to be a Younger Woman, and b) she has created a fiction that her husband is hopeless with documents, so she looks after passports. And though you and I may think that this is baying and barking at the moon with madness, her sanity and future depends on being thought to be three years younger than she is, so there we have to leave it.
But not everyone is as fraught. I know a man who is 70 now and very respectable and when he was 20 and not a bit respectable, he sold his mother's piano for £100 and put all the money on Sheila's Cottage in the Grand National, because his mother's name was Sheila, and he had dreamed five times that this horse was going to win.
And it did.
And the start of his good luck began 50 years ago because he went and bought the piano back for his mother for twice the money and still had enough to start a business. They had a family party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his bad behaviour last month.
And I was invited to a surprise party for the writer Clare Boylan, who was 50 this month. Being a fearful person myself who just hates surprises, I was doubtful about the enterprise. I thought that Clare, who looks a great deal younger than her years, might have a weakness if she came into a room full of people shouting "Happy Birthday!". But I was, as so often on this surprise thing, totally wrong. She really didn't know it was happening and loved every minute of it.
And the next day I got letters from all the friends I knew in a kibbutz in Israel saying that it was the 50th birthday of the state of Israel and would I maybe go out and celebrate this marvellous birthday with them?
When I first went to Israel in l963, the country was only 15 years old. There were such dreams and hopes and worries about whether they would live to see it grow up. They had come from so many different lands with different languages and they were all struggling to be able to speak Hebrew.
I remember a man I worked with that summer peeling potatoes and plucking chickens. He was born in l938. He escaped the Holocaust as a baby because he was looked after by Christians. He was an idealist and a dreamer who never wanted a Jewish Homeland to be achieved at the expense of anyone else's rights or aspirations. He said that he felt very sure that if Israel survived to be 50 it would be a wonderful place and that even though he would be an old man of 60, everyone would remember the dream that they had all worked for.
He is not alive today but Israel survived to be 50 and a lot of the dream lives on. And like many who knew part of that dream I am happy next week to celebrate the half century of a country that has so many good people and peacemakers willing to go the distance in the face of rigidity.
Fiftieth birthdays should be times of huge goodwill. Of 50 women singing around a table, as we had. Of surprise parties that really worked, as Clare Boylan's did. And people celebrating stupid bets on the Grand National that worked. Of the survival of a race that had faced extermination.
Only people who put on fake tan and pretend to be younger than they are don't get to join the party.