By Hardeep Singh Kohli: Life begins when? I'll have to suck it and see

Something happened on Monday last week. An event the implications of which will echo resoundingly in my life for years to come. On Monday, January 21, I turned 39 years old.

Now I know exactly what you're thinking. How can Hardeep be 39 when he has such good skin and so many fashionably hooded sweat tops? Well, I'm afraid, good skin and sports/casual wear notwithstanding, I have spent the past six days hurtling into my 40th year, which will eventually, as night follows day, catapult me into my fifth decade. My 40th year; my fifth decade. Where did it all go?

It's all slightly depressing. The list of things I will never achieve has become significantly longer than the list of things I might achieve. Life has moved from the active tense to the passive. I feel my body creak; I hear my body creak. I worry about my stomach and my bladder on journeys over 90 minutes. It's not that I feel I'm heading headlong towards the darkness and everything is a bit "woe is me"; it's just that it all feels so bland, so mediocre. And I hate mediocrity. It doesn't mean anything to be 39. And the fact that it means nothing, means something.

I am closer to death than birth. The average life expectancy for a Glaswegian man is 69; I'm 57% through my life and I still haven't worked out the best route from Glasgow to Aberfoyle. I feel like I'm in the August of my life: nothing to look forward to but the cold autumn evenings and the shortening of the days until one day… complete darkness.

On the upside I can stop caring about my personal hygiene now, having just spent a small fortune on skin/hair/eye and general body care products. Ladies are less interested in old men, so I can well and truly let myself and my already eclectic dress sense go. And I am expected to become a bit eccentric. I may well purchase a walking stick, pipe and a packet of Werther's Originals. I can embrace the downhill journey that moves me inexorably away from the peak of my life, down towards the valley of doom and despondency, and antique programmes on the telly.

Maybe it's true that being 40 isn't as bad as it used to be. Luckily I have managed to get my mid-life crisis done and dusted in my late thirties, and so long as I keep wearing long-sleeve shirts, no one will ever have to know about the tattoo I acquired in the shape of a small hillock. I have much to look forward to. The forties, the multitude of men's magazines tell me, is the new thirties. The fifties are the new forties and the sixties have been abolished and replaced with a long weekend in Auchterarder.

The Spartans believed in cycles of seven years: a child until seven, a youth until 14 and from 14 years on a man. Every seven years something significant is meant to happen in our lives. Or so they say. I'm exactly halfway through my middle cycle of seven years. That sounds to me like something to get very excited about. That and the fact that all of us over a certain age know one thing for sure. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, youth is wasted on the young. Ponder that while you suck on a Werther's.

I don't look half bard in kilt, Rabbie

It was Burns Night on Friday. The one day of the year I get to wear a kilt and not think twice about it. Besides which it was a VisitScotland bash, so there would be no shortage of men with eight yards of wool wrapped around them. Now, it's always a tricky choice for me. Craig, my kiltmaker, insists I have a proper tartan kilt.

I have an admission to make at this point. There is a tartan that has specially been registered for Scotland's Sikhs. The Singh tartan (pictured above) is widely available at any good kilt shop. The only snag for the Sikhs is that having arrived on these hallowed shores some years after the invention of tartan, all the best designs got taken (particularly the Andersons, who seem to have some of the lovelier weaves around).

The Singh tartan (Singh being the shared surname of all Sikh men) is an ugly tartan. I'm sorry to have to admit that, but it is. A bit too sky blue and green for me. I feel the reds, lavenders and dark blues suit our skin colouring better. I also enjoy the monochrome tartans; I have a lovely slate grey kilt and a denim one too. But my pièce de résistance is the elegant shadow black kilt, with matching jacket and waistcoat. And when I pitched up to my Burns Night party I can say without a shadow of a doubt that my heart was well and truly in the Highlands, even though my feet were walking the streets of London. I think the Bard would have approved.

Up to my neck in it over a Manchester quip

I made a flippant comment the other day about Manchester getting flooded and that it wouldn't be a bad thing if it meant their football team wouldn't keep winning. My flippancy was not altogether appreciated and I received an e-mail that stated: "I am from Manchester and have lived here all my life, and found your comment on Manchester not being a bad place to flood deeply offensive and racist."

Now much as I might have offended the Manc people with my ill-thought-through witticism, I was unaware that the people of Manchester were a race and therefore could be victims of my racism. In a return e-mail I posited the following notion: "It's not racist to be anti-Mancunian. It's foolish, but not racist. Manchester is not made up of a single race of people; it's just so diverse and cosmopolitan. Besides which, I really like Manchester."

But maybe I'm wrong. I understand that racism is against races as such – well that was where it originated from. But over the years it seems to have developed a much wider use. Has racism come to have a wider meaning than simply the discrimination of people based on their race? Discuss.