3 posts tagged “birthday”

I have never spent my birthday at work before, what with either being a student, a temp, or simply unemployed.  To have managed this at the age of 27 shows just how brilliant / slack I am - take your pick.  Being at work today is very strange.  I feel there should be a constant acknowledgement that It Is My Birthday but no - apparently I still have to get on with my research and can't simply bask in everyone's admiration that wow, I am 27.  By way of consolation, I get lashings of cake at about 3.30pm as long as I survive the embarrassment of the office singing happy birthday to me.  They're going to have to mumble the "happy birthday dear Fox" line as half of them don't know my name.  I am not a social butterfly.

I was hopelessly melancholic yesterday for no good reason.  It cleared up with a brisk march over the Millennium Bridge to the Tate. I recharged my soul with art and fresh air.  I stood in the middle of the bridge and looked out across all of London, watching the sunlight do unexpected things on the water, thinking about all the people and all the human pain and happiness and tragedy and emotion out there.  London is so scarily big and anonymous sometimes.  It is so easy to get lost. 

Thank you to everyone who has passed on birthday greetings, cards and presents - you're all bloody marvellous.  Yet again, I am touched and amazed by the generosity of you lovely internet people.  I hadn't realised how it was possible to care so deeply for people I have only met fleetingly or not at all.  I feel like part of a community again over here on Vox and that means a great deal to me.

I have just returned from a trip to the nurse which was, of course, approx. 3 million times less stressful than I thought it would be.  She gave me two injections, using the needles meant for premature babies because that is how pathetically scrawny my arms are.  I have the body type of someone who ought to be in an incubator.

Anyway, to celebrate surviving such trauma, I thought I'd blog about the next event on everyone's cultural calendar - MY BIRTHDAY.  I know how much everyone loves reading multiple birthday-related posts all about presents and cakes and how fabulous they are so I thought I'd start early.

I'm going to be 27, which is fine.  I've never worried about getting older.  Every year is another one closer to the day the off-licence will finally stop asking me for ID and men stop approaching me in clubs with the line "I know I'm probably twice your age, but..."  They stop, peer at me, and slur: "so, how old are you anyway?"  I open my eyes wide and say "16.  Well, almost."

The only thing bothering me this year is how to celebrate.  For the first time in ages, I am living near most of my friends so I'd like to corral them together in a spirit of obligation and enforced fun.  I usually leave these things to the last minute and ring people in a panic begging them to come for a meal/to the pub, so I'd like to be just a tiny bit organised this year. 

So - any ideas?  My brain keeps yelling "London Aquarium!" but I think it's confused by the diseases injected into me this morning.  After all, I've been to the London Aquarium, and it was a bit dull.  Just fish, innit?

My mum deliberated for ages about what to get my dad for his birthday, before deciding on a mobile phone.  But not the latest Nokia or Motorola, no sirree. As if to rub it in his face that he is partially sighted, she got him one of these:

Yep, straight from the RNIB shop, it's the hip new Easy5.  He essentially just has to mash the keypad with his palm to be connected to my mum, should he get lost on the way home from the newsagent or the back garden.  He doesn't venture too far from home now.

Despite the fact it looks like a Fisher-Price walkie-talkie, my dad still will not use it in public for fear that he will be mugged. I've explained to him that he could walk around Brixton at midnight with it in his outstretched hand, Donal McIntyre style, and it wouldn't be stolen, but no - his fear of crime is too great.  (Did I mention he lives in Ealing?  Where there has been zero crime since 1973?  Where the word crime has, in fact, been removed from the dictionary due to neglect?)

Happy birthday, dad.  He won't be reading this, not least because the font is too small, but still.  The thought was there.