It’s my birthday- Quick! Where are my swimming shorts?

Birthdays, for most people are big occasions. Those ending with a zero even more so. With this in mind, myself and the lovely Sarah decided to head off for a night in Bristol followed by a stay in a posh hotel to celebrate my latest such birthday.

In many respects it seemed a suitable ‘grown-up’ thing for a man who’d recently bought a ladder to do. No pounding dance music. No drinking of alcoholic beverages in every colour available as a shell-suit in the late ’80s. No singing my way down the street.

In some respects it was a defiant act of making sure I wasn’t acting too old.

It was all going well. Quick trip into town in the car. Underground car park. Check-in. Room with lights in the wardrobe, full-size ironing board, cupboards that go ‘fummpff’ and gently glide to a close rather than ‘ker-chunk’ like the Ikea ones. Then there was the marble bathroom, complete with array of ‘natural’ cocoa-chuma extract toiletries – or something like that.

It was posh. It had lasagne and wild-rocket penne available as room service 24hrs a day. It had a gym. It had a swimming pool.

That last one was important. We had selected it because it had one of those. That and a cheap last-minute deal, obviously. But mostly because we remembered it had a pool.

What I didn’t remember, however, were my swimming shorts.

And so it was that I spent some of penultimate hours of my twenties, running around Bristol as the shops closed trying to find some swimming shorts. More precisely, I spent them in JJB Sports, which as everyone knows is the wardrobe of choice for Jeremy Kyle participants.

Walking in I looked about as out of place as a man in a spacesuit walking with gorillas across the jungle. The shop was empty and, fearing I was as open to attack as a neon Wildebeest, I plucked up the courage to ask an assistant to point me in the right direction. He tried his best at customer service, trying to make small-talk through his breaking voice, and I selected one of the only pairs not finished in Bermuda- or Jackson Pollock-inspired patterns.

At the till I was served by a charming young lady, who chatted to her fellow till-worker about her evening’s plans through a wall of spearmint, which was  going around her mouth like socks and kittens in a tumble drier. She asked me if I wanted my receipt in the bag, and wiped her nose and flicked her fingers over the till before picking up my receipt and placing it dutifully in the bag.

We walked back, somewhat dejectedly to the hotel. Too old for sport shops – that’s definitely a sign of my turning thirty. But then, I can’t remember EVER feeling an appropriate age to be in a sports shop. It’s just not a natural habitat for a musician.

Later we ordered our 2 glasses of wine in the hotel and left a large banknote on the table on top of our £13 bill. The waiter whisked it away with a apologetic whoosh designed to go almost unnoticed and avoid the embarassment of a financial exchange, and we looked around the bar area filled with very elegant people covered in Prada and footballers’ wives. We did this for about 15 minutes, wondering whether the waiter had assumed that we’d just been very generous with our tip, and thinking that we’d really have preferred to have some change. Was there some part of this interaction we’d failed to grasp?

Why am I telling you this? Well, it seems I’m stuck in a no-man’s land – too old for some things, not old enough for others. I was so worried about the things I’d now be too old for, I’d forgotten to think about the new things I’d have to get good at for turning thirty.

Either way, I feel I can’t be too old yet – afterall, not everyone spends the last moments of their twenties running around looking for a pair of swimming shorts…