How to be a grown up... or when we first truly felt like one as remembered by the Mail's star columnists

It’s a question our grandparents would have answered instinctively with a certain milestone birthday - perhaps 18 or 21. Today, knowing when we’re truly ‘grown up’ and ‘in control’ of our lives is rather harder.

Is it the point at which we can confidently say what day the bins go out? When our cars are finally free of crisp packets and greasy sandwich wrappers? 

Perhaps it’s the moment we find ourselves putting our clothes away rather than leaving them strewn on a chair, or when – yawn! - we set up a monthly direct debit into a savings account. 

Could it even be the day we realise, yes, we do have a spare set of batteries for the radio, or actually we would rather read a novel than doom-scroll on a phone.

All of these were suggested as crucial signifiers of at last having a ‘sorted’ life in a recent survey of 2000 Brits – though rather worryingly, few thought we hit these markers of full-blown maturity before the age of 50.

But are they right? We asked four top Mail writers, all past that critical birthday, to tell us what makes them card-carrying adults with shipshape lives – and what still doesn’t...

‘At 68, I tell off policemen, know what a round wall socket means and am no longer afraid to open a brown envelope’

By Liz Jones  

Before the age of 50, I always assumed I had no future, or if I did, had no idea where it would be, writes Liz Jones (pictured)

Before the age of 50, I always assumed I had no future, or if I did, had no idea where it would be. There was never any point planting spring bulbs to make a garden because I’d never know if I’d be sticking around long enough to see their creamy heads emerge the next year.

Come April, I’d panic-buy expensive ready grown flowers. That was how chaotic I was, living hand-to-mouth, never saving or thinking about a pension or whether my kettle was furry, since I assumed I’d never grow old. I had the heating on 24/7, never opened any envelope that was brown and if anyone in Boots told me there was a three-to-one offer, I recoiled as if stung.

I might have lived in a £2m mansion, but I had no idea round sockets in walls meant your lamps were on a room’s internal lighting circuit and could all be switched on from the wall. Really? I’d never changed a plug and if anything started beeping in the ceiling, I’d call the nice man from Pimlico Plumbers.

I now know that this is the month to plant spring bulbs. I know no one will arrive to save me, so I must look after myself. I want a simpler life, so am relieved to no longer own a lawn, but I do own flower pots and bulbs and my very first packets of seeds.

And a bag of flour: who knew you could bake a cake?

I made risotto for the first time last week. It’s as though all those exotic culinary mysteries, just out of reach, are mine for the taking with a little patience. Ah, yes, I’ve learned not to rush, too, having always lived life in the fast lane. For most of my adult life, being unable to cook was a badge of honour as if, like Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, the oven’s only function was to store sweaters.

After many decades of struggling with corks, at the grand age of 67, a man told me I have to turn the bottle. Again, who knew? Yay! Even drinking bubbly is easier!

I stand up for myself these days, unafraid to tell off policemen, who always look surprised and back away. I’m also unafraid to ask for help: I usually have two assistants with me in Lidl helping me locate things (me: ‘Putting chickpeas there makes no sense: they should be with the tinned vegetables!’) and with the self-service till. So, yes, I now shop in Lidl rather than Wholefoods as I’ve learned nobody cares about the logo on your carrier bag.

Above all, I want to be comfortable. This surely is the true marker of a ‘sorted’ grown-up life. I stare at my four-inch bondage Louboutins, my tummy-shaming Victoria Beckham body con and shudder that I ever put myself through that torture. Really being in control of your life means not minding the fact you can’t always control what you look like. Crocs are lovely! I own a cobweb brush and two hot water bottles and fill them at bedtime, squeezing out the steam, just as I watched my mum do.

I grew up at a time when women were taught to look down on domesticity, practicality and to think only of their careers, followed by their attractiveness to the opposite sex. And so, we missed out on the skills that smooth our path and cost us little. Learning them late –I now know to use pressure when ironing, not to simply let it glide - thank you, BBC’s Great British Sewing Bee – has been liberating and, trust me, a great deal of fun.

‘At 59, the only thing that fazes me it putting the right bins out’

By Sarah Vine

Being a grown-up – or ‘adulting’, as my children prefer to call it – does not come naturally to everyone. I may be pushing 60, but I wouldn’t say I fully qualify, although I’m much better than I used to be, writes Sarah Vine (pictured)

Being a grown-up – or ‘adulting’, as my children prefer to call it – does not come naturally to everyone. I may be pushing 60, but I wouldn’t say I fully qualify, although I’m much better than I used to be.

I can do basic stuff like paying fines on time, and I am quite good at remembering boring tasks like paying my road tax or updating my passwords.

The bins, though, that remains quite a challenge. In fact, I would say that I suffer from quite an extreme form of bin anxiety, brought about by the unnecessarily draconian and complex bin protocol operated by my local authority (Ealing Council). 

Fair to say the Bin Police are unforgiving in their determination to ensure total compliance, and I find myself getting increasingly jittery as the day rolls round each week. 

There is the wet bin, the recycling bin, the general waste bin, the garden bin – and each one is on a strict rotation. Failure to comply can result in the specified rubbish type remaining uncollected. Sometimes the bin monitors will slap a big bad sign on the bin, a kind of public bin shaming that has neighbours’ curtains twitching. 

I’ve become so paranoid about the whole process that I’ve lately taken to going to the dump the day before in order to ensure that any excess or rogue rubbish is dealt with. Perhaps this is what the council want: to terrify residents into dealing with their own waste. If so, it’s working.

‘I’m about to turn 70 and still haven’t got my life in order!’

By Nadine Dorries

When I was asked to write about the age I realised I had got my life together, I laughed out loud. I am still waiting for this momentous event to occur, writes Nadine Dorries (pictured)

When I was asked to write about the age I realised I had got my life together, I laughed out loud. I am still waiting for this momentous event to occur.

I have spent my entire life in a state of perpetual chaos. Remember the episode of Motherland where the main character, Julia, played by Anna Maxwell-Martin, turns up at the school gate with her children only to discover it is World Book Day and every child except hers is wearing a costume? That was me. 

No matter how hard I tried, I could never quite nail getting it all together. PE kit was never fully packed. I’d turn up at nursery on my way to the station for an important meeting in London to discover that I hadn’t returned a crucial day out form or that all the little children had left for the zoo on a coach half an hour before I dropped mine off.

I thought things would improve as I got older. Not a bit. If I have a doctor’s appointment, for some reason I think I possess the unique ability to suspend time and can put a wash on five minutes before I’m due to attend.

Recently, however, I’ve glimpsed the sunny uplands of a well-organised adult life, and having experienced the sense of calm good order it brings, I desperately want to be that person.

It all came down to the discovery of making lists and buying a new home. Having been through the process of downsizing and then designing my own kitchen, I cannot tell you how much pleasure having a special cupboard to hide my coffee machine and toaster makes me feel. Nor the drawer beneath this cupboard for all my coffee pods, tea bags and morning vitamins.

Actually, I can tell you. They make me feel grown up. Only grown-ups have ‘breakfast pantries’ like this, after all.

I’ve lived in houses five times the size of this one, but only now do I know where everything is and only now does everything have a home. When I need a plaster, I reach out and open the correct drawer. No more wrapping toilet roll around my finger fixed with Sellotape.

Discovering the power of lists – and using the tech on my smart phone so I don’t lose them - has been transformational. No longer do I head to a supermarket and return home with everything but that which I went for. If I need something, I pop it onto notes and check it before I head to the checkout. It has revolutionised my life.

Online banking ditto. The joy of cancelling standing orders I’ve been paying for years, many of which I don’t need, feels addictive. I’m not fully there yet, of course - I’m definitely still a work in progress. The next goal is to have my Christmas cake made at the end of October, and to be as good as ready for Christmas on December 1st.

Naturally I have never achieved this before, but having discovered how hugely satisfying it is to make a list and then to tick things off it, I have high hopes. I just wish I’d worked this out - and grown up! - years ago.

‘Driving my car onto a ferry, paying the school fees and the shock of my grandmother’s funeral’

By Quentin Letts

One day we all will die. Only when you grasp that, perhaps, can you be said to have reached life’s cruising altitude. Before it is time to fasten seatbelts and the steep descent begins, writes Quentin Letts (pictured)

After six years as a student, cold reality arrived: buying a suit for work.

It was the mid-1980s and there were no dress-down Fridays back then. Work - at a magazine company in Cardiff - meant smart clothes. My mother bought me a briefcase, black and plastic, with my initials in stick-on lettering. And I was measured for a three-piece suit. The menswear chap ran his tape round my girth and started fiddling with my inside leg. Oi, do you mind? I opted for a navy blue job with a subtle red pinstripe. It lasted two years before going at the crotch, as they always do.

I can still remember the tape measure snaking around me like a boa constrictor, squeezing the freedom out of life. The golden years were gone. At 23 I could postpone adulthood no longer. A living would now have to be earned.

Was this the moment of ascension to adulthood? Or was it four years earlier on the day I first drove my own vehicle on to a car ferry? It was the B&I boat from Holyhead to Dublin. When we were children my father had often piloted our Vauxhall estate on to the Townsend Thoresen ferry at Southampton, bound for Cherbourg. Now I was doing it myself, alone, in my little black Morris Minor en route to university in Ireland. That hit home somehow.

Later came two other moments. Writing the first cheque for school fees: it was big enough to hurt but what I knew, with dread, was that compared to the bills we still faced it was mere loose change. We had three children and those school fees would paw at my door for 20 ruinous years. As the child of a prep school headmaster I could hardly complain. Yet as the fountain pen flowed over the cheque I knew I was basically enslaving myself for decades.

And then my grandmother’s funeral, held on a grey autumn day in Cheltenham. This was the first family death I had known. Gran had been such a life-force, such fun, full of ginny stories about her childhood in the Raj. To a tiny extent I helped to nurse her in her decline and yet it was still hard to grasp how ill she had been. Never again would she rattle that charm bracelet and say ‘oh, Dar-ling’ with her gurgling laugh. Few of us, when young, understand the clammy corporeality of death.

I was standing next to my brother Alexander when the undertakers produced her coffin from the back of the hearse and lifted it to their shoulders. That was when it whacked me: this is real.

Now Alexander, too, is dead. So is my father, and sister Penny, and a brother, Stephen, whom we never met. One day we all will die. Only when you grasp that, perhaps, can you be said to have reached life’s cruising altitude. Before it is time to fasten seatbelts and the steep descent begins.