The official tagline for this column should be "What the embittered and slowly withering person in your life is thinking".

Think back to Tuesday, and you might remember feeling a bit of a jolt as the planets momentarily froze, reeling from the shock impact of a shift in the space/time continuum resulting in a universe in which I am no longer a teenager.

Maybe you just heard the screams.

As milestone birthdays go, 20 is a vicious one.

No novelty badges, helium balloons or exciting newly-legal areas of the constitution to dabble in (I'm holding out for 21 when I can adopt a child — I plan to find myself a blonde 18-year-old who can stand in for me at lectures and attend the odd family function looking fresh-faced and youthful).

No, instead all that accompanies turning 20 is the hollow inward groan of quietly resigned despair, as one feels one's youth slip away through her liver and fall out of her sensible, 20-something shoes.

I do not remember feeling this way at 10.

Currently, I'm distracting myself from blossoming crow's feet, and the growing urge to host Tupperware parties, by compiling a list.

It is called "Songs About Teenagers That Are No Longer Applicable To My Acne-Free 20-Something Life Of Relative Calm".

Thus far it contains: Chuck Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen, The Sweet's Teenage Rampage, Dion and the Belmonts' Teenager in Love, The Ramone's Teenage Lobotomy, Wheatus' Teenage Dirtbag, The Undertones' Teenage Kicks, and, just for good measure, Cliff Richard's The Young Ones.

Sir Cliff, in his eternal wisdom, does however remain relevant to other areas of my life — why, just last week I bought some living dill from the fresh herbs section of Morrisons and felt compelled to pay tribute on the bus journey home.

The question is, what do I do with the playlist now?

Am I banished from the realms of angsty adolescent lyrics for evermore?

I think I'm going to save the list for desperate moments, when tax-paying and freezing batches of soup for future dinners and general adulthood all get too much, at which point I will paint my bedroom black and secretly listen to all the songs on a loop, frantically applying Clearasil products and writing poetry all over my rucksack in Tippex.

Maybe the authorities will intervene and inject Norah Jones melodies intravenously into my person until I am sedated.

The trouble is, there is no definitive collection of 20-something songs to move on to.

Nobody writes songs about Alka Selza, or how best to fairly divide the gas bill, or having to improvise drinking utensils out of vases when all your glasses are too involved in Draining Board Buckaroo* to be disturbed.

It's an odd time to be in your 20s.

While 30 is the new 20 and most kids are carrying around 18-plus perks in their High School Musical lunchboxes, there's suddenly a massive quarter-life gap where nobody seems to expect an awful lot of you.

Perhaps it's a nice thing — the angst is old hat, but it'll be a good while before anyone expects me to host dinner parties and talk to them about the stock exchange. I'm free, unshackled by societal expectation.

I might buy a celebratory pot plant.

We're not meant to settle down, have kids, get a career, mortgage or tin opener that works properly until we're in our 30s.

As far as I can discern, the only expected step up from the teenage wasteland is a halfway sensible haircut and talking politely to non-specific elderly aunties when occasion demands.

Apart from that, the decade is pretty much a void of nothingness: "Just get on with the living thing, perhaps try not to fail your degree, maybe go to India and find yourself, and we'll check up on you in 10 years".

So, my plan for the void is clear: write the defining oeuvre of 20-something musical anthems, and potentially do the washing up now and again.

The kids can keep their teen spirit — I've got a herb garden and a genuine ID, and I'm not afraid to use them.

*Draining Board Buckaroo: All you need is a mound of washing up, an attitude of astounding slothfulness and about three weeks to watch your kitchen sculpture evolve, each piece gingerly balanced on the next, until everyone is forced to walk around on tiptoe lest they disturb the heaving mass of crockery and flatten the cat. Fun for all the family.


EDITOR'S NOTE: The team wishes Lauren a very happy 20th birthday, and have enjoyed looking at her party photographs on Facebook.