I envied my parents recently when someone inquired, four months before the actual event, how I planned to celebrate my 32nd birthday. They were born in rural India, where people were too busy trying to survive, engaged in brutal caste strife or drinking moonshine, to bother noting when babies were born, and have hence been spared the annual tyranny of having their age marked.

But then, if the stress of birthdays were truly annual, they would be bearable. You could, at a push, bring yourself to endure 24 hours of forced jollity, measuring your life (unflatteringly) against others and drinking until you wept. But increasingly, as one gets older, the dread of birthdays begins infecting large portions of the year: no sooner have you endured one than you are worrying about the next. Frankly, it's time someone proffered an alternative.

The ideal solution would, of course, be to do away with such anniversaries altogether: my mum and dad have managed without them. But then they don't use the internet, and eradicating dates of birth might create problems in terms of identification when using eBay or ordering truckles of cheese online. Moreover, the urge to mark the passing of age is too entrenched in the British psyche to eliminate completely: it's just something we can't help doing, like watching Big Brother.

My suggested compromise, in part inspired by the fact that the pain of birthdays is exacerbated by their pointlessness - so what if another 365 days have passed? - and in part by my recent purchase of a Remington NEDH2700C Hygienic Ear/Nasal Clipper (developing body hair in your ears truly signifies the onset of a new phase of life), is to replace birthdays with developments that have real significance in the ageing process. And after a great deal of mature reflection, I have come up with a list of events that might fit the bill:

The first time you spend 40 per cent or more of a dinner party talking about property prices, schools, the relative merits of cleaners, pensions, wills, ailments, or retirement homes for your parents.

The first time you spend more than ten seconds reading an advert for pensions, will-writing services, life insurance, commemorative crockery or a Remington NEDH2700C Hygienic Ear/Nasal Clipper.

The first time you utter three or more of the following phrases within a 12-hour period: “this music just sounds like noise”; “at your age I was...”; “you treat this place like a hotel”; “a bit of cheese would be nice”; “actually, I think Allison Pearson has a point”.

The first time you realise that you don't recognise a single song in the Top 10, but at the same time have listened to Bob Dylan: Live at the Gaslight 1962 so many times that you can identify which track is playing by the first two seconds of crowd noise.

The first time you attend a wedding, christening or funeral and instinctively know, out of sheer practice, which version of the Lord's Prayer to recite, even though you are not Roman Catholic or Protestant - or even Christian, for that matter.

The first time you can look dispassionately at two or more of your ex-partners and state without bitterness that you are glad they left you for another man/woman or wonder, with genuine bemusement, what you saw in them in the first place.

The first time you find yourself peering into a mirror to examine the emergence of a zit and discover a new wrinkle and/or a new white hair in the process, and then, reeling back in dismay, realise that every item of clothing you are sporting was purchased from a supermarket.

The first time you find yourself with time to browse the internet and instead of surfing for porn or music, you look for lawnmowers, cookers, property or truckles of cheese.

The first time you log on to the internet to browse for lawnmowers, cookers, property or truckles of cheese but in between opening the internet browser and logging onto Google, you forget what you wanted to search for.

The first time you realise that no amount of exercise is going to make you look as good as you did at the age of 21, and despair.

The first time you realise that no amount of exercise is going to make you look as good as you did at the age of 21, and feel pleased because it means you can let yourself go and eat more cheese.

The first time you see snow falling and think “damn” instead of “brilliant”.

The first time you manage to walk past several fields of sheep and cows without even wanting to emit a “baa” or “moo”.

The first time you look at a photograph of yourself and see your mother, father, grandmother or grandfather.

Looking over this list, I foresee problems with my plan, not least that some of these events are actually as depressing as birthdays. Also, the logistics of organising spontaneous celebrations might be difficult. But there are numerous advantages. There would be no compulsion to be cheerful at these events. Meanwhile, the spontaneity would mean that we would be spared the tedium of planning: the worst thing about birthdays, as with bank holiday weather, is the anticipation. Also, this system would help with the grieving process. If the last time you saw someone he was marking the purchase of a stair lift, it wouldn't be such a shock to discover that he had dropped dead.

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