It’s official. My life is over. Completely over. Well, at least according to half the people I’ve talked to this year. Yep, I Sue Carter, aged 39 and three quarters might as well hang up my boots, crawl into bed, pull the duvet up and never bother to come out again for no other reason than I am about to turn the “Big Four Zero”.

That momentous age where for some reason people lose the ability to speak your birthday out loud. Since turning 39, I’ve found it amazing to see the lengths people will go to, to avoid saying “40”.

As soon as they get a sniff your next birthday could be your last (ie it no longer has a two or a three in front of it), it seems their ability to pronounce your impending birthdate completely disappears.

Instead you find them pretty much divided into three camps.

The first lot are “The Spellers’, the ones who say “Oh, you’re turning f-o-r-t-y”?.. The second lot call it “the big four-oh”… and the third dare not speak the word at all, preferring instead to refer to your impending celebrations as “the big one”… (I’m starting to understand why poor old ‘he who must not be named’ in Harry Potter was such a miserable sod).

Add to this the fact all of these descriptions are accompanied by a look of pity as they are spoken, and I fear the world is in desperate danger of the word ‘forty’ being banished from our vocabularies forever.

I can see it now, tourists queuing up at the Ashmolean in the year 2099 to see an exhibition of wind up watches, video recorders and receipts showing you could buy a tank of petrol for less than one week’s salary before they then move on to the star exhibit… A chance to watch old YouTube videos of people singing Happy 40th Birthday to their friends.

The f-o-r-t-y stigma is strange isn’t it? Because I’ve found the older I’ve become, the better life gets. You stop needing to impress people in an attempt to ‘make something of your life’, because you realise getting to the age of 40 means you have made something of your life, and what you do for the next 40 years is whatever you damn well want to do.

Admittedly I’ve still got another three months before I turn ‘you know what’, but somehow I suspect I won’t wake up in the middle of November having suddenly lost the ability to live, love, learn, laugh, or put four words that begin with the letter ‘l’ in the one sentence.

My blasé attitude could also have something to do with the fact a women’s life expectancy in this country has just risen to 82 fine years of age, which means I don’t have to start panicking about ‘half my life being over’ until next year’s birthday. Mind you, I feel a bit sorry for you fellas though, considering you’re only expected to make it to “s-e-v-e-n-t-y – n-i-n-e”.