25

My aunt sent me this. I appreciate the gesture, but I last visited her about twenty years ago and I think she's forgotten that I age.

Today, after what feels like distressingly little time, I'm a quarter of a century old. Most of my year at school had birthdays this week, so it's probably easier to say "Happy birthday" to everyone I know on Facebook and the number of hits will be higher than the misses.

What's happened in the last year? Importantly, I didn't die at 24 like I'd seen in a dream, although I made a pretty decent attempt at it halfway through. And in an example of words coming back to bite you, I've said for a while that I was fine to not have to watch my calories or what I ate as long as I didn't reach 25, the year when everything you've been feeding yourself suddenly starts to matter and you instantly inflate like a rubber dinghy until you start hauling your giant wobbling rear end down to the gym.

Whitney and I held a dessert party yesterday with a couple of people from her work and college, and I made a sticky toffee pudding for it, still the only good thing to come out of Home Economics from the academy. I felt the first sure signs that I was aging then - every time before when I've made it, I've tended to put in a couple of extra scoops of sugar just to make sure it's deadly enough, but this time I was reading through the recipe and saying "Three sticks of butter, are you insane?" There was definitely alarm when we plotted it in Whitney's recipe application and it came out to 34,000 calories, but that was for a double recipe - as it is it's still about 500 to 700 calories per slice, which is about as healthy as diving under a steamroller. And even though she thought we wouldn't have enough, about two thirds of it is still lurking in the fridge - she's going to take it to work tomorrow and hopefully distribute the fat and sugar content among as many people as she possibly can.

Thanks to everyone who's already given me birthday wishes - my own wish is to get better at remembering other people's. I also got a lot of emails at midnight reading "Hello DavidN, We at [forum name here] would like to wish you a happy birthday today!" - including from places I haven't been to in years and can't remember why I even have an account there, like BemaniStyle. It made me realize that I might be online altogether too much.