To all those who want to say 'I told you so'... :)

It was my birthday last week and, because I am a melancholy person at the best of times, I was reflecting on what I have learned over the course of the last 32 years. I came to a rather scary conclusion - even if age does lead to wisdom, your kids are never going to believe any of your advice until they get old too!

I found it frankly terrifying the other day that I referred to something 'in my day'! I'm 32, not 82! This led me to think about all the times when my parents or anyone older than me would say 'you'll understand when you grow up' - and I hate to say this and it truly pains me to admit that they were generally right.

For example, when I was about 14 I had my first boyfriend - he was a nice guy and we spent lots of time together but he became distant after about 6 months. This may have been down to the fact that my parents were divorcing and I was a bit of a mess and therefore was being a stroppy little diva - I can't remember the reason but he split up with me and I was totally devastated at the time. I moped about listening to Morrissey and The Smiths and The Cure, crying profusely and shouting at everyone that 'they didn't understand how I felt!!'. Now, looking back on this, perhaps I was a bit over dramatic but at the time I just thought that it was the worst thing that could ever happen - Ever! And at this time my Dad, going through a break up of his own, simply said 'you're 14 and in a few weeks time you wont even know what the fuss was all about' and at the time I really resented that comment - didn't he know that I was in pain! The truth was that after about 6 months my pain had eased and I had another boyfriend. It's not that I didn't care about my first boyfriend, I did care very much, it was just the mere fact that what my Dad was trying to say, in a possibly more tactless way, is that time heals pretty much just about anything - but I didn't believe that, well...not at the time anyway.

I didn't understand why my parents divorced, but as I got older and had relationships I started to realise how things can go easily downhill.

Incidentally, at 15 after my second boyfriend dumped me after about 6 months I wore black clothes and mourned the end of the relationship for about a year. I was a seriously overly dramatic teenager! That's the point though, at the time you think that it's the end of the world.

I also thought about other things that people had said to me over the years - for example 'When you are a teenager and in your early twenties, time seems to go really slow but once you hit late twenties/early thirties - time just flies!'. When I was 26, a friend of mine said this to me in the office I worked in. I didn't believe him at the time, he was older than me and in my head I just thought 'that wont happen to me!'. How could I ever be so wrong!

Another of my friends used to talk about going to DIY stores and buying furniture for his home and I, at the age of about 26, would rib him mercilessly and call his trips to furniture stores 'Dawn of the Domestic Dead' while mimicking a zombie (you get the picture) and he said 'one day, you'll be the same'. I laughed and said 'no way! I will never be like that!'...

...Cut to approximately four years later and I was stood in a popular furnishings store buying cushions and vases and wondering where to put the new lamp I had just picked out when I had a moment of clarity. I thought 'Oh no, he was right!' - and he was. Not only was I turning into the exact thing I had mocked but I was enjoying the purchase of household furnishings!

When one of my friends was planning his wedding several years ago he was telling me about choosing the design of wedding invitations and I said 'They're just invitations, I can't see what the fuss is all about' and he replied 'One day, when you get married, you'll understand how important they are'. Again, I just laughed it off but then last year when I was painstakingly applying miniscule champagne glasses outlines to bits of card for my own wedding, I could kind of see what he was getting at.

When I was single, people constantly told me that when I stopped looking for the perfect man that I would find him. I thought that was rubbish, until the moment when I looked at the man who is now my husband and realised that the perfect man for me was right under my nose and I just didn't realise. We celebrated our 1st year wedding anniversary last week and he makes me so happy - I really should listen to people more.

Another thing I have gained clarity on is the way that people can manipulate you for good and bad and how I didn't realise how right those people were that said 'when you look back on this, it will all make sense'.

How unfair is that?!? That you sometimes only truly learn that people are right after you have done the wrong thing? I suppose that really the phrase shouldn't be 'you learn from your mistakes' but rather 'after you have done something stupid, you truly will know why'.

I was such a pain in the bum for most of my life, never taking advice or truly believing that when people say 'you'll understand when you're older'. The funny thing is that, even though I have been through a fair amount of stuff in my life, no one will take my advice! Is that the punishment for not listening to my elders?

So, to all those people who said that I would understand things better as I got older - okay, you were right! you were right! you were right!

If anyone wants me, I'll be eating humble pie...