You can live it up at any age. You can go out and drink beer with friends or stay in and read a few Austen novels. You can sleep with as many people you want, or you can stay in at home with your significant other. You can get up to whatever crazy antics or simply choose not to.

When we're at school we pick a new best friend every academic year, and that's it-we're set, bound by a mutual love of The Wombles. By our teens we have a 'crew', a 'gang'. At university we're drunk. And by the time we're adults with jobs and responsibilities and families we... stop making friends?

When my daughter was four months old I decided it would be the thing to sell up and shift our new and amorphous life together two-hundred miles south....

Nostalgia has spawned virtually an entire industry, making zillions out of the ever-increasing urge to regress to what we think of as happier times, flogging us kitsch memorabilia and useless antiques at premium prices. All this, for a concept as hollow and insubstantial as a bubble.

Ridiculous as it sounds, I am convinced that this gap between adolescence and irrefutable adulthood lacks the cultural signposts available to other age groups. It's unsurprising that writers and directors turn to the supposedly hedonistic seventeen to twenty-one year olds or the nest-building thirty-odds for much of their inspiration.

Once upon a time, an unmarried girl hid her pregnancy for 9 months, travelled to the north of England and gave the baby up for adoption. It was 1975. She also hid the secret from her family and friends for 20 years until, the child, now a fully grown woman, found her mother. I was that child.