Twenties

I spent my twenties drinking beer. I spent my thirtieth birthday drinking beer and eating oysters. And I remember thinking how far I'd come. Thirty. That number can blaze with dread in the young adult imagination. For years, it loomed ahead of me like some kind of buzzkill apocalypse, the exact moment when everything I loved would come to a screeching halt. The carousing would stop, the long nights would turn to early mornings, the glittering friends would metamorphose into glowering Dursleys. Thirty meant adulting, as our pathetically adolescence-obsessed culture calls it, and adulting meant not freedom but obligation. Admittedly some of that has come to pass.