I DON'T think about my age until there's some awful reminder like picking up Easy Living magazine, which I buy from time to time, and realising it comes with a free oven glove. An oven glove! That'll have potential readers charging for the newsstands, fizzing with glee.
Actually, I do have one friend who lives by this publication. She cuts out recipes and gardening tips. So impressive is her filing system that I have attempted to mimic her, snipping out something like a page on how to grow basil.
It lies all alone and forlorn in a folder until I rediscover it, months later, and there's a curled up dead spider in there.
Maybe I'm just not the Easy Living type. When I was a teen, every girl bought Jackie which sometimes gave away a free lip gloss.
Lip gloss = kissing = boys. That was exciting. You might have been lucky enough to bag the split-heart love heart brooch - to be worn open if you were without boyfriend, and closed if you were spoken for'.
A tad unsubtle, perhaps, but a darn sight more scintillating than vast padded mitts, even if they are designed by Laura Ashley.
I can't buy into this Housework Is Sexy vibe. Mercifully, I missed the last series of BBC3's Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife, and have yet to read her new book, Lessons In The Art of Modern Household Management.
Perhaps I should be interested in this stuff. I keep waiting to be, but nothing happens. It's the Anthea factor - the way she makes my toes curl, and not in a good way.
"I have never smoked, done drugs, eaten or drunk to excess," she said in a recent interview. "I know that now it's payback time," she says, adding that she has lots of friends in their 40s, and that "you can tell the ones who have seriously partied." Do her buddies realise that they are being viewed so harshly?
"It starts to show on your face," she says ominously, "at around 42."
Forty-two? Arrgh!
That's my age. Although I try to resist, I can't help examining my face in one of those horrific magnifying mirrors. It is worse - far worse - than the oven glove moment.
There's a vertical groove between my eyebrows which, as my fringe is usually so long and unkempt, I generally fail to notice. How can I have not seen this? It's the Grand Canyon of grooves.
According to a Natwest survey, one fifth of bank loans are for cosmetic surgery. No wonder, with the likes of Anthea bleating that everything starts shrivelling at 42 and, worse, it's all your fault for enjoying yourself.
I meet a friend for lunch at Fifi Ally.
She confesses that she's been in town since 9.30am, having had an "appointment". And she points to a tiny pinprick between her eyebrows.
She had a groove there, she explains, and it made her look cross all the time. It's the same as my groove. Except hers is no more, and she looks smooth and serene.
My friend is the last person I'd have thought would resort to Botox. But heck, she looks good. She also reads magazines like Elle and Vogue which never give away oven gloves (Vogue is too posh to give away anything much, and Elle tends to dispense vest tops, sunglasses and - eek - bikinis).
After my friend's confession, I charge into Frasers and throw myself at the mercy of the Clarins ladies. Two kinds of moisturiser - one for day, another for night - plus a gentle exfoliator are recommended. Having the time or inclination to exfoliate is as likely as discovering that our rabbit hutch has begun to self-cleanse.
Clarins lady says I might also try an eye cream and a facial oil. It's horribly alluring. All these beautiful bottles, their contents smelling divine, promising to make me look less like one of Anthea's hard-partying friends and more like someone who has never woken up in the morning with their party shoes still on.
It's as if she knows that my 20s passed in a blurry haze with nothing in the fridge but a lump of suspect Cheddar. I ask the Clarins lady about a richer cream but she says, "No, that's for your 50s." Which means, surely, that it'll have an extra youth-making effect?
I buy the Clarins kit, and I know it's working because I start to feel younger immediately. I haven't used the stuff. I'm not even home.
Just tapping my PIN into the little machine makes the Anthea spectre melt away.
Fiona's new novel, Lucky Girl, is published by Hodder, 6.
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