Images best forgotten with age

Being uncool is probably okay as long as you don't remember the fact.
A school of thought exists in certain circles that there is no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself and lately I've been wondering if I ought to sign up.
No one can be truly certain at exactly what age inappropriate behaviour actually becomes inappropriate but I'm fairly sure I hit the target market a few years' back and the time has come to settle down and be a Grown Up.
The unfair thing about this proposition, however, is that from almost the moment I could walk and talk, good behaviour has been my speciality.
Excellent manners, returning home before curfew and generally not breaking any significant law has been my signature style for 33 of the 33.5 years I have walked the earth.
At 15 I flirted briefly with reckless abandon and rebellion until my mother (always the smarter of the two of us) booked me into boarding school without any leave slips and left me there for the rest of the year.
Nothing inspires good behaviour quite like three months of over-cooked cabbage and tall iron gates.
While my friends were experimenting with unemployment and drinking to excess in foreign lands, I spent my 20s working my way up the corporate ladder, getting early nights to facilitate early starts and securing the sort of respectable marriage any mother would be extremely proud of - at least until the divorce.
Now that I'm in my 30s, all of my contemporaries have, of course, caught up with me and made their own comfortable moral beds in which to lie, surrounded themselves with well-heeled husbands and designer babies that sleep through the night, and generally they are living the lives of the rich and respectable.
But despite bolting from the gates of good behaviour and leading the field for an entire lifetime, I am finding myself to be a sprinter of sorts, who hasn't got the stamina to make it to the finish. Instead, this old horse has slowed from a trot to a stop and is lately contemplating making a desperate dash back to the start line to re-do the race with a few kicks and bucks thrown in to keep it interesting.
Unfortunately, though, while drunken nights and reprobate behaviour are accepted and expected when we are young, when we are older it is simply uncool.
But it's not how the world sees us but how we see ourselves that truly matters and being uncool is probably okay as long as you don't remember the fact.
Which, thanks to a wonderful evening in the company of some fine Hawke's Bay wines, would have been exactly how last Saturday night would have played out if it weren't for video phones.
As it turns out, behaviour that seems incomparably witty after lights out turns out to not to be in the cold light of day when you press "replay".
Friends have a way of playing down embarrassing behaviour when recapping a night on the town, but video phones present things with a high-definition honesty that makes you want the ground to open up and swallow you.
If we believe von Goethe, who says behaviour is the mirror in which everyone shows their true image, then video evidence would suggest I am in urgent need of some Mr Muscle Glass. Heavy Duty.
But in my defence, although it is compulsory to grow old, no one ever said I had to grow up. All I really have to do is leave my phone at home on Saturday nights.