After years of watching television and movies, I had always presumed that discovering the first signs of ageing would follow an established pattern. I thought I would be smoothing on make-up at a dressing table covered in snapshots of friends pulling faces and invitations to parties, when suddenly I would stop and look appalled. Spotted! A wrinkle! I would pull at it, try to disguise it with make-up and then sulk for the rest of the programme.
Either that or I would be walking in the park when a small child would go by on a tricycle shouting "Out of the way grandma!" I would stop, look appalled (again), and then blow a whole wad of cash on clothes and eat lots of ice cream. I was looking forward to these epiphanies; not because I was looking forward to wrinkles, but because I like shopping, ice cream and sulking.
To the contrary, the realisation that maybe, just maybe, I'm not getting any younger arrived without warning, slouching in like a cat, rather than announcing itself with serial exclamation marks.
First of all, there was the slightly astonishing experience of envying my parents. As an adolescent, you get used to feeling superior to your parents at all times - you just know that everything they do is 10 billion times more boring than what you are doing. Once we stopped going on family holidays, for example, I always thought of my travelling experiences as wild and revelatory compared to their holidays driving around France or Spain.
This year, however, I listened to my parents discussing their itinerary, which centred around eating, finding small harbours and following the sun - and slowly turned green. It sounded sedate, it sounded unadventurous; it sounded like bliss. Then when they went away, I did the unprecedented; I went out home (to their house) for the weekend for a bit of peace and quiet. I tried to pretend that this was for practical reasons - to fill in the gap between house-sitters - but I couldn't really hide the fact that hey, I wanted to spend the weekend at home.
Not so strange, you might think, given that home is a comfortable place with fields all around and air that you could bottle and sell to Japan. Yet as a teenager, I would have run screaming through those fields at the mere suggestion of hanging out at home on a Saturday night. This was nothing to do with home itself - I had an unfashionably happy family life, a fact which has permanently ruled out a future career as a memoirist. It was just that nobody in their right mind wanted to spend the weekend at home in the country when they could be in the heart of the suburbs, hanging out with friends, drinking coffee and trying on bangles.
Last weekend, I quite happily headed home and spent a few days reading, going for walks, cooking and watching videos. I climbed the tree behind our house to throw fir cones down the chimney. I watered the plants. And all weekend I chuckled to myself at how old I was getting - no shock, no horror, no splurging on ice cream and no sulking. Just a smirk when I found myself folding supermarket bags and storing them away for later.
Of course, I'm under no illusions that these are anything other than the teething pangs of serious ageing. An older friend wondered, rather pointedly, whether I'll be quite so sanguine when I lie awake listening to a screaming baby and feeling the bags grow under my eyes. Or whether I'll someday find myself writing about the arrival of cellulite on my knees in a national newspaper. So yes, I'm quite sure I'll be as horrified as the rest of humankind when I realise that I'm not going to live forever and when builders have stopped wolf-whistling at me.
But the cosy weekend at home was a pleasant surprise, because no one ever tells you that there are good sides to getting older. Television shows, magazines, Bridget Jones, Jane Fonda, cosmetic manufacturers, aerobics trainers, and particularly the fortysomething women that have gone before you, would have you believe that ageing is nothing but doom and gloom from midnight on your 21st birthday.
What everybody neglects to mention is that it also means getting calmer, more relaxed and easier to please. My friends in town had a wild time last weekend. Five years ago, missing a good night out would have been like having molars ripped out without an anaesthetic, but now I couldn't care less. There will be other parties. I wasn't in the mood for a party anyway. I finished chopping herbs and forgot about the party.
What everybody seems to forget once they become obsessed with wrinkles, creaking ankles and middle-aged spread, is just how desperate you feel half the time when you're young - and not just about all the well-documented traumas such as the Leaving Cert, alarming body changes or the awkwardness of having to talk to the opposite sex. It's not even that you're particularly unhappy when you're young, it's just that you're full of a general malaise, perching on the sidelines waiting for your life to happen. You're desperate about nothing in particular, you're just desperate; full of a terrible yearning for pastures greener.
Then as soon as those pastures hove into view, people start telling you about the terrors of ageing and instructing you to enjoy your youth while you can. I can't help feeling that the whole process of growing older would be made a lot easier if people made a habit of pitying the young and sociable. "Ah, you poor thing," they could mutter. "I remember when I used to have to go to parties and have my finger on the pulse. Sure, don't worry, you'll grow out of it soon and get into gardening." The young could ignore the advice completely; the middle-aged could feel pleasantly smug and everybody else would be too busy to mind one way or the other. . . until they started to think about growing old. Perfect.