FOR a while now it has been lurking in the background like an unwanted guest at a party -- you are aware they are there but avoid eye-contact to stop them coming over and engaging in you in mind-numbing conversation.

About trains or something.

But now it's getting ever closer, a cruel fact which was only emphasised this week. Soon I will be 30.

On Tuesday the Long Suffering Marjorie and myself will be heralding my 28 years of life on this earth. That means the next birthday will be the last as a Twenty-something. Then it's 30.

I'm obviously not ignorant enough to realise I will soon be celebrating the big 3-0, but it has always remained the last thing I thought about. Like being mugged -- it's always going to happen to somebody else.

But it was hammered home this week that this time I am the victim. In only two years I will be robbed of my youth.

When discussing what I would want for my birthday the Folks were throwing things at me like a dining-set or "something nice for the house."

Billy-Boy and my Big Sis -- who it seems was born 30 -- chipped in with equally useless offerings. At one point Billy Boy asked if I wanted a dustbuster!! A mini vacuum cleaner so I could get into those annoying nooks and crannies during my cleaning chores. I could even use it to keep the inside of my car sparkling. Naturally I told him to shove it up his nook and cranny.

But, they countered, these kind of gifts -- and not a life-size statue of Elvis -- are relevant to somebody my age. Somebody who is knocking on 30.

"It's about time you started acting your age" they chorused like some kind of vigilantes whose sole aim is to seek out late Twenty-somethings, and make them aware of their impending responsibilities.

It may seem a long time off until my actual 30th birthday -- August 7, 2003 does sound like a time when we will be all wearing silver jumpsuits and eating three-course meals by virtue of one single pill -- but it will soon be upon us.

Think of Man United winning the treble, Blackburn being relegated or Burnley going up. Seems like only yesterday I know, but all were in 1999 -- two years ago. Or 48 months as I like to think of it (it sounds longer.)

It's not that I'm particularly scared of being 30, it's just the baggage that comes with it.

Think of somebody who is 30 and you think of somebody with a mortgage, an expensive car bought 'on tap' and somebody who thinks Ally McBeal is funny.

With only two years to go, I mean 48 months, I am still renting a one-bedroomed flat, driving a battered Peugeot 106, and find nothing slightly amusing about a set of schmaltzy American lawyers who could do with a few steak pies down them. Some may even say I am like an obnoxious little boy who needs a hiding. But each to their own.

The Folks, of course, would like me to do all of the above -- the car and the house etc -- and are forever berating me about how renting is "dead money" or how I need a "good solid car" which would give me "years of trouble-free motoring" etc, etc.

They want to see me married-off, thinking about starting a family of own. They even want me to get a pension!

If I didn't put my foot down they would have me going to one of these 'out of town shopping centres' to buy some "good sturdy holiday clothes" before we all jetted off an holiday together, like the Waltons.

Getting older I may be but my resilience to resist such family excursions is stronger then ever.

Anyway they all seem to overlook the progress I have made in the time since I bid farewell to my teenage years way back in 1993.

Then I still lived at home, borrowed -- and crashed (twice) -- the Folks' car and pretty much relied on them for everything as I started college that very year.

A measly paid part-time job in the local supermarket supplemented my income for a while but there was only so-long I could put up with being called a "trolley-boy" by my mates, all of whom held down well-paid engineering type-jobs. I quit soon after.

They should be proud of the fact that nowadays I stand on my own two feet. Even if the shoes I wear are sometimes covered in sick!!