My friend’s daughter just turned seven, and threw up. She was sick last year too, and the one before.
“It’s like she’s allergic to birthdays,” her mum told me. Hard relate.
It’s my birthday this week. A big one. The kind that comes once a decade, and that people ask you what you’re doing for. It has taken a long time for me to get to this point, but my happy reply is… nothing. Yes, really.
I never do much, in fairness. The world is divided into those who make a big deal out of their birthdays and those who don’t, and I believe you can tell absolutely everything you need to know about someone from which of these camps they fall into.
Oh to have the confidence and emotional stability of a birthday celebrater! To call it your birth-week, or even birth-month. To force everyone you know to come somewhere they might not really want to go, make effort, spend time and money, without a worry about whether they’re bored/resentful/have to be up early for work the next day/secretly hate you now. To announce “IT’S MY BIRTHDAY” to any human being you encounter all day long. To know what to do with your face when happy birthday is sung at… sorry to you, and be able to bear it going on for as long as it does.
You may possibly have deduced from subtle clues that I am in the latter camp, the non-celebrators. The cringing blushers. Birthdays literally make me embarrassed to have been born. I’ve always felt like this. But I’ve had many parties, gatherings and drinks over the years because if someone asks you what you’re doing for your birthday and you say nothing, the reaction you get is, I imagine, the same as you would if you announced you’d recently murdered your entire family.
I got talked into Doing Something for the last big one, because everyone said, “Oh you have to Do Something!” And so, like an evil dictator-narcissist, I invited my friends to an extremely intimidating restaurant, in a who-do-I-think-I-am private dining room, no less.
I enjoyed maybe six per cent of the evening at a generous estimate. The snooty staff were whatever the polar opposite of welcoming is, the table was long and not-conversation-friendly. Out of the corner of my eye in all directions I could see people who’d never met before awkwardly asking each other how they knew me, like at a wedding, but without the getting married aspect to distract everyone.
When the bill came, the maitre d’ laughed out loud in my face at the very idea of going round couple after couple with the card machine after dividing it 17 ways, and demanded to be paid in full. Which I did, with a shaking hand, obviously adding an enormous tip to teach him a lesson. The next day, I had to do complicated maths with a hangover, and message my friends one by one to apologetically ask for their share.
square POLLY HUDSON
One of the greatest gifts I have given my son is the ability to gossip
Read MoreSometimes even forking out for a meal you’ve just had at the end of it – because you’re no longer hungry then – is a bitter pill. Imagine being sent my miserable bank details and asked to stump up a full 24 hours later.
I knew I wouldn’t like that evening but gave in to it because of peer pressure, from most of the people who ended up sitting around that table, for whom karma was indeed a boomerang.
This decade, it’s a different story, because of all those cliché rewards of getting older that are meant to make up for what’s happened to my neck and eyesight, but don’t. I know myself well enough now to be sure I will not enjoy a big do. I have the guts to say nope and stick to it no matter how many times someone suggests, insists, cajoles, or tries to shame me into having one.
Hopefully by my next big birthday I will have evolved into the kind of enlightened being who truly doesn’t care about anyone’s opinion of me – sadly I’m not quite there yet. But I am at the stage where people thinking I’m boring for not having a party is definitely a far better option than having a party so people don’t think I’m boring.
Instead I’ll do a few, low-key little separate things with a few, low-key little separate groups. I’m going to please myself, because IT’S MY BIRTHDAY. Tune in next week, to hear all about the utter horror of my huge surprise party.
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