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Birthdays, here today, gone tomorrow – celebrate now
Evening Standard – August 21, 2006
Only one day to go till Husband’s birthday, and the excitement is mounting. Au pair buying presents. Me buying presents. Children wrapping presents, then getting so excited that they take them out of the cupboard where we’ve been hiding them and unwrap them again for one last gloat over the assorted socks, jerseys, books and ghastly “Best Dad” mugs we’ve assembled. Grandad taking receipt of birthday cake from Patisserie Valerie – the same kind he used to buy Husband when Husband was a child. “He has to have a cake,” explains Grandad. “It’s important for the children. They’ll love blowing out the candles.”
All the feverish preparations have made me wonder, how do you mark a grown-up birthday without embarrassing yourself? Once you pass a certain age, the sight of a cake so stuck with candles that it looks like a panicking hedgehog loses its charm. If you’re turning 18, or 21, or 40, or even 70 – the big ones — you can make a good case for dancing till dawn. But there are dozens of dates in between for which there is just no conventional diktat on what you should do. The thought of being 37, or 43, isn’t supposed to fill you with joy. So why celebrate at all?
Post-21, I marked the passage of every year with happy invite-everyone-you-know-and-stay-up-late parties, or exotic holidays. I’ve drunk champagne out of a shoe at dawn in the Tube (it seemed a good idea at the time) and toasted my new year from the banks of the Zambezi , watched by a lover and a lot of hippos. But once I got married, post-35, I found myself, year after year, going the muted, spouse-only, dinner’n’dignity route. Given the march of time, it seemed more appropriate.
Yet now my children are old enough to know about birthdays. Their own, with conjurers, clowns and vast themed Spiderman cakes, are the highlights of their year – so much so that they clamour for half- and quarter-birthday parties too. They think their parents’ birthdays are almost as exciting — more unmissable opportunities for fun and overfeeding. That’s been our cue to start enjoying them properly again.
There’s a lot planned for this weekend’s 44th. Sparklers at breakfast and lunch, with guests, candles and cake, in Regent’s Park. It’s all for the children’s sake, we murmur, somehow failing to acknowledge to each other or ourselves that we’re also having another, grown-up party after they’re in bed. I suspect we’re just using their pleasure in the day as an alibi – the excuse we needed to ignore the advance of middle age and grab the chance for celebration while we still can.
ENDS