Landmark

I was 40 this week.

Seems very strange to be saying that, since I think I'd only just about got used to being in my 30s.

Lots of things I can remember so clearly (and don't really seem that long ago) are now 2 decades in my past - at a time when I only HAD 2 decades of past.

Looking back, I feel that my 30s have been my best decade to date. I think I found out a lot about myself, did a lot of things I should have done a long time before and generally finally felt OK about being me. My 20s were much more about being irresponsible and having fun - not that I don't continue to do these things - from time to time. Getting married is probably the most obvious example of the change in me - I can't imagine even thinking about it when I was 28 or 29.

I grew up in an age where in 1999 the moon left the oribit of the Earth and in 2001 we found signs of intelligent life on the moon (must have come back by then). So much was predicted "by 2000" - including thinking machines, nuclear war and space travel for all. It's easy to think that little has really changed, but in fact much has, although in more subtle and insideous ways that we could ever have imagined.

I was just turning 30 when I had my first real exposure to the internet - and now I find it hard to imagine a single day without it. I had my first mobile phone just a couple of years before that - and by the time I was 30, GSM was making big headways and we all got introduced to SMS. We now routinely use computers in our homes and offices which are incomprehensibly powerful and can store ridiculous amounts of information - however because the software running on a lot of them is so poor, we hardly notice.

Some things seem to be cyclical, though. Having spent years moving computing power away from huge mainframes onto the desktop, we're now told cloud computing is the way forward - back to the big data centres - albeit in a far more elegant way. I, once again, drive a Mini - having learnt in Minis and last driven one back in the early 90s. OK, so it's not a _real_ Mini, but it still has the same feel (for me, anyway).

And so, as I wave farewell to that decade, I can reflect that it's really the first decade of my life I was really aware about entering and leaving. Too many other new things were going on when I entered my 20s that I didn't really notice (and it didn't seem such a big deal).

What will the next decade bring for me? Probably about time for a mid-life crisis, I think.