It took a return to my old university to force me to accept the reality that I am, in fact, a grown up, writes blogger Dan Wainwright.

Yes I know that 27 is a bit old to wake up to that, but it’s not like I’m learning the truth about Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy.

Four and a third years ago when I graduated from Lancaster University the place was a building site so along with a small group of alumni I went back for a rummage around our old stomping ground to see how it had changed.

To my eternal horror, upon seeing the gleaming, tasteful modern accommodation blocks that replaced the concrete toilets of our youth, I uttered the immortal words: “Things are a bit different to my day.”

With those words I was saying Open Sesame to the door of young middle age, if such a thing exists.

What next? Am I about to start shuffling around telling any kid with snake hips and too much hair that I can remember when all this was just grass?

My friends and I persuaded our way into the Sugar House, the Students Union nightclub, to be greeted with a trendy refurbishment and toilets that were so clean you could eat your end of the night kebab off them. Where was such luxury in our day?

Of course not everything has changed for the better. Getting lunch at the campus fast food joint I paid £7.15 for a cheeseburger and chips.

I can remember when we used to go out with a tenner, get nicely merry and have enough for the bus and a pizza on the way home. These kids don’t know they’re born.

Three or four years as an undergraduate go so fast but at the time you think you’re immortal. It’s tempting to look to a 25-year-old post grad as a father figure.

Fortunately for us Sugar House was playing songs we danced to during our nights out, Scandalous by MisTeeq, Buck Rogers by Feeder.

Except this time they were accompanied by a fear that the DJ would shout out that these were “Old School” hits and seal our status as a bunch of not-yet-wrinkly granddads.

With all of us now in happy relationships there was mercifully no temptation to play the sophisticated older man to the freshers.

If we had I’d almost have expected them to scan our palms for the flashing red bulb in the film Logan’s Run, the sign that someone in the futuristic utopia is hurtling towards 30 and their compulsory euthanasia.

I’d better leave it there. My back’s playing up and I need to do my exercises before bed.