IT was my birthday this week: don’t make a fuss, I’m not 8. I don’t need jelly and ice cream, or a badge informing people it’s my “special day”.

I feel the same way about adults over-celebrating their birthday as exiled sports presenter Richard Keys does about Arsenal players high-fiving and looking happy about beating Fulham.

I’ll concede it does come full circle and if you get to 100 and a get a card from the… king, then fair enough have a cake and some candles, and party like you’re back under the fog machine at Manhattan Lights. Everybody else, rein it in. You don’t need to take your birthday off work, you don’t need to force your friends to the upstairs room of a trendy pub you’d never normally go to for a boring party.

Of course, the cold truth is that when you go bald early, as you may have noticed I did in a Jason Statham type way, the years all blend into one.

You look the same for decades, you write the same column about Arsenal being better than Spurs for years and the life markers become the birthdays of your kids rather than your own. And, of course, the free-falling age of Arsenal players.

There was a happy time when you could look ahead and joke about a player in their 30s being old and slow. Ahhaaa, look at him, the old man… you run like a snail, man.

Now, you look back the other way and wish you could take on the wind tunnel of Camden Town’s tube escalators each morning with the pace of a 33-year-old. I don’t want to be slower than Willian.

Given all this, how was it possible to truly enjoy the Gunners’ excellent victory at Brentford on Sunday when Mikel Arteta viciously trolled everybody in their 40s and beyond by turning to the bench and bringing on 15-year-old Ethan Nwaneri?

The dream of one day playing for Arsenal myself died a long time ago. Don Howe and George Graham’s teams were probably a little too conservative for my cultured right foot, and so I was overlooked by the scouts combing the playing fields of north London… is the way I tell it. And I naturally refused to go down the divisions.

But now all of a sudden, Arsenal are not just not fielding me in the team but also salting this wound by bringing on a player who is nearly 30 years younger. That’s a dagger to the soul.

I wish Ethan well, though: for his GCSEs, for winning at Fortnite, for his first milkshake date at the Odeon and of course bringing the glory days back to Arsenal football club.