Eight things you should have nailed by age 35

Do you consider a trip to Mitre 10's gardening department a dreamy way to spend your Sunday? Photo / Getty Images

By the time you're 35, you should have saved twice your salary. No, no, don't laugh: this is bona fide advice from finance news website MarketWatch, which has just gone viral.

Of course, they might as well have suggested we find a hen that lays golden eggs and, instead of poaching them all at once and serving them with smashed avocado, keep them back for a rainy day.

Much of Twitter took the suggestion just as seriously, following it up with a variety of ever-more-inventive parodies. To save you having to read them all, we've come up with our own list of things you should really have done by the time you're 35...

1. Started considering a trip to the garden centre a treat

We never realised quite how much fun there was to be had pottering about, browsing plants and garden accoutrements. Especially the accoutrements (we still don't know how to keep plants alive for more than a week. That knowledge will come when we're 40, we hope). If the garden centre has a cafe and an interiors shop attached, then all the better. It's not just an errand, you see: it's a whole afternoon out.

2. Nailed your bedtime routine

Not only have your childhood punishments – going to bed early, not going to the party, not leaving the house – now become your adult goals, but you can drop everything and be under the (Hungarian goose down) covers at record speed: teeth brushed, make-up off, night cream on. Nothing is going to get between you and your eight hours.

3. Established a tupperware collection

You have 14 lids and 14 tubs – yet none of them match, most have the rubber seals hanging out, and more than a few still bear the Tango'd tinge of takeaways past, which won't shift despite being put through the dishwasher on repeat for two weeks.

"Want to take some home?" you ask dinner guests (you have those now, too), before remembering the tupperware tower that threatens to topple out every time you open the kitchen cupboard doors. Please don't get us started on the plastic bag collection under the stairs.

4. Made "the noise"

The first time it happens, you'll write it off as being a bit tired. The second time, you vow never to do it again. But, slowly and surely, you will catch yourself emitting little "oofs" and sighs every time you sit down, stand up, bend over to pick something up off the floor. This is only heading one way...

5. Collected a drawer full of "useful things"

Its contents will include at least two rolls of Sellotape you can't find the ends of; candles of varying sizes; clothes pegs; a tape measure, just in case; six phone chargers, all for phones you no longer own; assorted batteries, most of them depleted but which you can't throw out because you know you should be recycling them, but you can't quite remember where; ribbons from gifts that seemed too pretty to bin but which will never be re-used in your lifetime; and a light from a bike. You don't own a bike.

6. Bought a power tool

We hate to use gender stereotypes (we'll leave that to people older than us), but this one tends to be a particularly male foible. Owning an electric drill makes you feel like a grown-up, sure, but what are you actually planning to do with it? Open a bottle of wine?

On the subject of which...

7. Ordered a bottle of wine with a knowledgeable air

You're in your thirties, not your fifties, so you're still usually opting for the second cheapest bottle on the wine list, but you do at least now know your viognier from your picpoul de pinet. Or how to give the impression that you do.

8. Tutted about "millennials"

Neatly forgetting that, technically, you are one yourself. But THAT lot (the ones who don't remember a time when Ask Jeeves was the leading internet search engine; or life before the internet, for that matter), with their earnest pursuit of fulfillment and ability to take offence at every turn? They could use a relaxing trip to a garden centre.