Growing Old is Inevitable, Growing up is Optional

I was most glad to have this legend awaiting me on a card when I got home from the library last night, which was at 3.30am. Staying at work till 3am is quite grown up, I suppose. It is certainly ageing. Sitting up half the night talking to someone is not work, however, and is quite the opposite of a grown-up thing to do when you have an exam the next day. But it was highly enjoyable. Coincidentally, a goodish portion of this conversation had been about when and whether one ever becomes a Grown-up. Had I ever indulged the fond fancy that I might be one, it would have been dispelled upon speaking to my brother, who spent the weekend shopping for a cot, pram, changing table and nappies, which he then (and this was the killer blow) took home in the car.
Compared with getting married and having a baby, holding a driving license is not, I know, that huge a marker of Grown-upness, and quite a different matter from the creation and sustenance of human life. But it is yet another eminently achieveable adult goal which I have entirely failed to tick off the list. Inertia is no small part of this. I have been quite happy as a non-driver, for several irresponsible reasons: that I am lazy; that I like to drink; that on train journeys I can sit and read my book; that I have always, extravagantly, insisted on living within easy walking distance of everything; and that I truly love, and get an almost erotic thrill out of, being driven. Naturally there are many valid and conscientious reasons for not having a driving license, but these are surely not they.
In fact, I did try to learn to drive once. I took to it with great enthusiasm, squandering quite a lot of money on lessons and entertaining seductive images of myself in the guise of my terribly glamorous best friend, who used to take me out whizzing round stunning mountain passes in Switzerland in her sexy black two-seater with the roof off and the CD player on loud. Instead the whole enterprise ended in tears somewhere outside Maidenhead last July when I panicked, forgot to steer and wrote off someone else's car by driving it into a hedge. This was clearly a salutary warning that adulthod is best left to adults, who must be miraculously equipped to cope with experiences so stressful, frightening, humiliating and expensive. The best that can be said of the whole sorry episode is that, as ill-omened forays into the world of Grown-upness go, it was at least a motorvehicle that had to be written off and not a baby.