Threesomes. Tattoos. Casinos. Sleeping with celebs. Now he's 30, Pixelsmith doesn't have to do any of them.

LAST month, I turned into a 30-year-old. This threw up a number of problems, chief among which was the acknowledgement that I am now, irrefutably, an adult and am thus obliged to nod sagely in an interested fashion whenever anybody mentions tax, mortgages, gardening, caravans or children.

I don’t understand anything about children. People mention the hilarious things their kids get up to and the whole conversation swoops frictionlessly through my head, as if a tiny secretary who lives on my eardrum laminates the soundwaves on their way in. I’d better sort that out if I’m to carry on being 30.

"Some people look great with tattoos. Those people do not generally have the skin tone of a vampire who showers in Tipp-Ex. Stood in front of a whiteboard, I’m practically invisible"There is a huge advantage to being this age, though, and that is that you are no longer obliged to worry about doing all the things you’re supposed to have done by the time you’ve left your 20s. The deadline has passed. You have been confirmed as uninspiring, cowardly, frigid, unadventurous, unspontaneous and dull, and there’s nothing you can do about it any more without being accused of having an early mid-life crisis. So the pressure’s off.

Here’s a selection of the things I now don’t have to do, according to some lists I found on the internet:

Have a fling with a celebrity: up until the age of 25 or so, the closest I had come to a celebrity who wasn’t on stage at the time was spotting David Bellamy in Kings Cross Station. I had presumed that becoming a journalist would have allowed me to rub shoulders with the occasional celeb, but five years into the profession the most famous person I have had a face-to-face conversation with is Oz Clarke. It was a classic love story: he told me his Christmas wine choices for the paper’s Weekend section; I wrote them down in a notepad and then drove home. I’m not sure that qualifies as a relationship but Girls Aloud’s publicist has stopped returning my calls so it’s all I’ve got.

Do an extremely menial job: I once worked for a bakery in Otley. Its Saturday morning backroom shift involved turning up at 7am and dealing with dough in various states of decay: moving sticky, stinking, old dough from a plastic bin to a skip; chiselling lumps of rock hard dough from the floor; washing dough off utensils and ovens; looking at bits of dough stuck to the baker’s skin and wondering if someone was ultimately going to end up eating it; that kind of thing. It took five hours and paid £8, and I only lasted one Saturday. After not turning up on week two, I was sat in a graveyard eating a yoghurt (this seemed normal as a teenager) when my former boss walked past. He just waved cheerfully, from which I gathered that the employee turnover for the job must have been quite high.

Get a tattoo: some people look great with tattoos. Those people do not generally have the skin tone of a vampire who showers in Tipp-Ex. Stood in front of a whiteboard, I’m practically invisible. You can’t stick ink on that. I’d look like a newspaper.

See the world: I’ve seen pictures of the world from space. It looks really nice.

Drink yourself unconscious: oh wait, I can tick this one.

Lose a week’s wages in a casino: I take to gambling like a salmon takes to stock market trading. Show me a sport and I’ll struggle to tell you what it’s called, let alone work out who’s going to win it. Not that I’ve never known the wretchedness of betting bad and losing big. I once bought four Lottery scratchcards in a row and only won £1. That’s the equivalent of six Mars Bars down the drain, or more if you buy them in a multi-pack. I’m glad those days are behind me.

Grow a proper beard: I hope this one isn’t also on the list of things to do before you die, because even after two weeks without shaving I have all the facial hair of a 12-year-old. Girl.

Have a threesome: Does it count if the other two participants are in the house next door and you’re just waiting for it to end so you can go to sleep? In which case, call me Casanova. At least you could have until they moved.

The list goes on. It is very heavily weighted in favour of things I haven’t done, which is a bit of a shame if you consider arbitrary targets set by people you’ve never met to be an acceptable gauge of life success. Which it obviously is.

Fortunately, I have the best part of a decade to do all the things you’re supposed to do before you’re 40.

I expect I could tick several of them off after an evening with Girls Aloud. Better get back in touch with that publicist.

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