Will Harris looks forward to the gold hot pants

According to professor Brian Cox, we’re all doomed. Billions of years from now, our sun and all the other stars will explode and obliterate every last trace of life in the universe. Once they’ve finished doing that, each star will be replaced by a ghostlike husk of dying matter called a black dwarf.

So now the universe is dead. And because the universe is dead, according to Brian, that means there’s no time any more, so time itself is dead. Everything is dead, and in a big soupy mess, and nothing ever happens ever again. This news, you will remember, is being brought to us by the bloke whose other claim to fame was playing the keyboards on ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.

The other day, on the tube, the American tourist next to me turned to his little girl and said: “Maya, stop hitting that man!” At first I was relieved (there is, after all, only so much swinging of a Hannah Montana lunchbox into one’s nuts one can take), but then I clocked his exact words. Man? Man? I felt like jabbing the guy in the chest and yelling, “How dare you! I’m Peter Pan!”

“The common thread running through all of this, of course, is a fear of things changing”

I’m getting older. My hangovers last two days now, my jawline’s started to go, and on those rare occasions I go out dancing my knees scream bloody murder. I also moan a lot more than I used to. Mostly about the fact that Yorkies are one square smaller than previously and yet still somehow cost 65p, but other grievances are emerging. The rise of e-readers. Lansley’s plans to reform the NHS. The common thread running through all of this, of course, is a fear of things changing, of every staggering step that takes us closer to our inevitable cosmic death (thanks, Brian!). And none of it’s helped by the fact I’m dating someone who was born in 1990 and who I recently found out is too young to remember Debbie McGee.

According to a 30-something friend of mine, this is all a natural part of the gay life cycle. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “You’re just on the Kylie Trajectory. We all go through it. Your Stock, Aitken and Waterman years are well behind you, and now you’re stuck in that late 20s wasteland between ‘Confide In Me’ and ‘Light Years’. Psychologically speaking, you can expect to be taking parts in box office turkeys and posing as dead Shakespearean heroines with Nick Cave until your 30th.”

“Is that supposed to cheer me up?” I ask.

“Well, of course!” he says. “After 30, it’s gold hot pants all the way”.