Afternoon:
15°c
"Are we being left behind?" a friend asked me recently. She had surveyed the achievements of our university peers - mortgages, marriages, moolah - and was worried that our lives (still minus all three) fell short. The question followed a reunion where a few too many ladies had gloated over the sparkler on their left hand.
Through sixth form, university and in the first couple of years post-graduation, my contemporaries led largely similar lifestyles. Most were broke, in angst-filled relationships and having to wage regular wars with mice in their damp-ridden flats.
On hitting our mid-twenties though, some of the cohort pressed fast-forward, keen, it seemed, to enter the Middle-Aged Club early. Once happy to down diluted vodka out of plastic cups at Cheapskates, they now look unimpressed if handed enamel-stripping plonk at a house party.
Camberwell Kebab (when drunk) or Café Rouge (when sober) no longer cut it. And they have swapped that student staple - baked beans on toast - for Borough Market's finest. The upgraders are, of course, Mammon-worshippers, bean-counters, solicitors and management consultants, these their pay-offs for being tied to their desks.
But it isn't just an income gap that has opened up between my peers, there's a life milestone gap too. Many are ditching drunken Twister to play happy families; the first of my friends to get married had three children by her 25th birthday.
Meanwhile, the still-young-inside occupy a no-man's land, somewhere between teenage kicks and fully fledged adulthood. Marriage remains just a hypothetical for us. We're still on the Mr Wickhams. And while wealthier friends have mortgages, my own castle is of the bouncy variety.
So when we all meet for dinner, the divergence doesn't just manifest itself in enforced smiles when the bill arrives and the lighter-pocketed among us wonder how much we could get for selling a kidney: there's a conversational split too.
At one end of the table, the discussion is about mortgage rates and John Lewis's soft furnishings. At the other, we wonder how these fun sponges morphed into our parents and predict that they'll soon be no-shows if the meal clashes with Gardeners' Question Time.
In answer to my friend who fretted that we were the ones missing out, I said that we were simply taking the scenic route. While it may have been largely thrust upon us (the recession hasn't helped), there seems some wisdom in taking time over the big decisions. Some of our acquaintances seem in a desperate rush to grow up, viewing life like an orienteering race where the aim is to reach every checkpoint and punch every hole in your card as quickly as you can.
That might sound like the answer of someone trying to justify their own lack of punched holes - no husband, no home - but there's verdant grass on both sides. At a recent wedding, a friend was hectored by the bride's relatives about how envious she must feel. But no quantity of Le Creuset could make the roving-eyed groom seem like a catch.
The casserole dishes can wait until my fourth decade. Besides, surely those of us still dancing on tables in our twenties will be spared the mid-life crisis?
