Yesterday

Yesterday I did this thing called ‘having a birthday’ (my thanks if you sent birthday greetings). Now normally I don’t really like ‘having a birthday’. But yesterday I quite enjoyed it.

I think one of the things I don’t much like about ‘having a birthday’ is celebrating it. I don’t like having to do the thinking about how to celebrate, who to invite, and then actually doing the celebration. I do sometimes think about doing nothing. My fear then is that someone will either take over and organise something that I don’t want to do with people I don’t want to celebrate with, or that someone will organise a surprise. I dislike surprises more than I dislike ‘having a birthday’. So I normally sort something myself.

Last year I combined it with doing a ‘Ruthie is leaving’ thing, so that the focus was off ‘having a birthday’. The year before lots of us watched a film in the park and I got really rather tipsy (which took my focus off ‘having a birthday’.)

So this year, why did I actually quite enjoy it? Well mostly because I didn’t celebrate it. Very few people where I now live knew it was my birthday. Those that did know know I don’t like celebrating it, so let me not celebrate. No one mentioned it when we were in school, so the children didn’t know. I went to someone’s for tea, they just said ‘happy birthday’ and gave me a card, didn’t make any more of it than that. And then in the evening I went crown green bowling with people from church (most of whom had no idea it was my birthday). And so by not celebrating I actually had an incredibly pleasant birthday.

For those of you who think it makes me sound all rather boring, I am being made to celebrate this Friday, but it was organised all last minute so hardly anyone could come, so I can pretend it has nothing to do with my birthday and is just about a few friends having fun. And then there will be a weekend later in the month when I see family and so I might use the excuse of it having been my birthday recently to get them to cook me dinner and buy me beer, and another weekend next month when I shall be involved in a triple birthday celebration with some dear friends as at the beginning of the year we decided this would be more fun than buying each other presents. Somehow though, those celebrations being not that close to my birthday make them ok celebrations. So yes, this year I think I coped rather well with ‘having a birthday’, mostly by not having one.