28 Jan 2026
Ruth Newman begins a monthly column exploring life in the year before forty, set in St Albans and rooted in the everyday questions of adulthood, choice and freedom.
It’s a bright January morning in St Albans and I’m walking home from Nkora with my Americano, passing a steady procession of prams, scooters and tiny humans in Boden coats.
This city does family life exceptionally well. It’s friendly, polished, organised and very good at reminding you of what family life is meant to look like.
I’ve lived here for six years and I love it, but St Albans is a place designed around a very particular version of adulthood: school runs, garden trampolines, two parents who own matching trainers.
Entire streets feels like brochures for “The Life You’re Meant To Want”. And as I walk through it, weeks away from turning thirty-nine, I’m aware that my own life looks nothing like the one on display.
I used to think forty was a cliff edge; some dramatic moment where all the doors slammed shut at once.
It’s quieter than that. It’s less of a bang and more of a gradual narrowing. You don’t panic. You just start to notice which paths are still clearly marked and which ones are gently fading out of view.
The truth is, I’m happy. I have a career I care about, friends I adore, a home that’s mine and a life that feels deliberately built. I’m healthy. I wake up to quiet, not chaos.
My evenings belong to me. I travel. I read. I change my mind. None of this feels like a consolation prize.
Still, in a place like St Albans, freedom has a different texture. Here, adulthood has a script, and it’s performed cheerfully and at full volume in every park and café. School drop-offs, playdates, family holidays, mortgage extensions.
The rhythm is so dominant that even when you’re happy outside it, you start to wonder if you’ve missed a cue.
London never made me feel this way, and I suspect I’m not the only one. Big cities are full of people being gloriously mismatched. You never feel late or early, timelines overlap and diverge without much comment. In commuter towns like St Albans thought, life is on more of a fixed schedule. There’s a shared choreography and when you’re dancing to a different song, you feel it.
I always assumed a partner would show up somewhere along the way. There were a few almosts, each one instructive in their own way. I’ve never felt rushed by love.
I trust it will arrive when it’s meant to. It’s not a life that has passed me by – it’s a life I could have stepped into more than once and didn’t.
Motherhood, on the other hand, never felt like my path. I love the children in my life deeply, but I never felt the desire to build my world around being a mother myself.
For a long time that certainly was effortless. I was building a career, travelling, becoming myself. But standing on the edge of forty invites a second look, not fuelled by regret but by attention. You start to ask not what you’ve lost but what you’re actively choosing, and which questions you’ve been casually stepping around because there was plenty of time.
In the everyday ways, my life looks exactly as I hoped it would. I come home each night to my (tiny) beautiful flat. I laugh a lot. I share a close and happy bond with my family. And every night I fall asleep next to the most devoted man I’ve ever known: my seven-year-old chihuahua, Van, who is unwaveringly convinced that I am the centre of the universe.
And the gaps? The husband? The kids? The garden? The things St Albans presents as the gold-standard adulthood package?
Often, they simply don’t feature in my thinking. Occasionally, maybe after spotting a hot dad playing chase with his adorable children in Verulamium Park, I waiver slightly. Both can be true.
Which is why this year – the year before forty – feels like a deliberate pause. A moment to notice what I have, what I don’t, and what actually matters when you strip away the background noise of other people’s lives.
I don’t feel like im standing at a crossroads. Rather, I feel like I’m standing still on purpose.
This is my life.
In this town.
At this age.
And so, I’ve decided to keep a monthly record of what unfolds between thirty-nine and forty, here in St Albans. Not just for me, but for anyone else quietly wondering where they fit in.
