MY husband turned 40 at the weekend and I bought him a cardigan.

It was a pretty cool cardigan - if that's not too much of a contradiction - and I'd like to add it was just one of several gifts, but it was a cardigan nonetheless.

Later that night we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, then a crowd of us picked our way through the vomiting teenagers decorating downtown Swindon to head for The Apartment, where we stayed until way past our bedtime. The next morn. . . no, afternoon, when we got up, our son was most disapproving. "What time did you get in last night?" he demanded, a scowl on his very serious face. "You were drunk.

You woke me up. Aren't you a bit old for all that?"

We laughed, of course, but only on the outside. Inside, the seed of doubt had been sown.

Are we too old to go out and cut some moves on the dance floor, getting down with the kids in da club? I fear the last sentence answers itself.

Forty is a funny age (or so I'm told, since my own landmark is a whole 972 days away - practically a lifetime).

It's an inbetween age - in between youth and senility, in between Radio One and Two. Suddenly, you are officially considered a grown-up, even though you don't feel like one.

But my son's scathing comments got me thinking. Perhaps now that we are the parents of a teenager, we have a responsibility to stop acting like one.

Perhaps, as he so tactfully pointed out, we are getting a bit old for 'all that'.

I suppose that means no more going to see rock bands, then. I'll cancel those Kooks tickets, or sell them to someone younger. Shame, because the kids were looking forward to that, but they won't want to go to the gig with a couple of old fogeys.

Sensible haircuts, that's what's next - none of this allowing our kids to grow it long. A nice short back and sides, that's what we old folk want to see.

And we'll be cancelling the iTunes account.

That popular music makes far too much racket for my liking.

No, we'll invest in some piano lessons instead - now that's what I call a tune.

I've yet to run these new measures past our children, but I'm confident they will approve. We are, after all, only acting our age.

Or perhaps they'd rather we clung on to the last vestiges of youth and pretended we can still party like we did in the Eighties. - seem to remember cardigans were in then, too.

4:03pm Thursday 3rd April 2008

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