Yesterday it was my birthday, so obviously I ran away. My friend lent me her cottage, hidden up a dirt track, shy behind a high hedge with a bedroom view of sheep-dotted hills. Here, the kids brought me a breakfast of three fried eggs with mint choc chip ice cream, raspberries and a slab of chocolate. They sat close and watched to make sure I ate it.
Normally I have as complicated a relationship with my birthday as I do with all anniversaries. I pretty much hate them. And at this time of year they run in a streak: Christmas, New Year, birthday, Valentine’s Day.
A memorable childhood birthday was my sixth when, struck with a virus, I vomited across the kitchen floor and the whole thing was cancelled. From eight on they occurred during term-time at boarding school. Cards arrived at breakfast. At tea my friends banded around a cake encased in pink fondant. Literally encased. We convulsed in a collective sugar high and then went to bed. (All pupils had the same routine).
Since then they’ve been marked mostly with ambivalence. For a while I had a friend who celebrated her own birthday on mine (though hers was three days later). “I’ll get you a cake,” she’d say to entice me to come over. And then wouldn’t. “Oh, it’s her birthday too!” She’d remember as everyone put on coats. Actually, I didn’t mind. I was happy to avoid the date. Jesus, if I were to have a party, it would never be on the inauspicious day itself.
My favourite Christmases were those that were non-Christmases — those when I volunteered to work, or the one I had eating Chinese food on a beach in Bahia Brazil, or in the Middle East where it passed blessedly unnoticed. All the best New Year’s Eves I was asleep before midnight.
What is it about dates, though? There’s the pressure, obviously, the sense that everything should be perfect, a heightened anticipation that too often precipitates disappointment — or crisis. Dates are a wormhole too: instant access to intense emotion from the past — good and bad. We all have dates that are joyous — my children’s birthdays are three.
December 19 is love, for me. Others I recall with agony (June 11) or with grief (August 30: my cousin was killed in a motorbike accident aged 22).
source - https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/my-birthday-is-yet-another-occasion-i-m-meant-to-celebrate-plenty-of-other-dates-have-greater-a4050511.html
Normally I have as complicated a relationship with my birthday as I do with all anniversaries. I pretty much hate them. And at this time of year they run in a streak: Christmas, New Year, birthday, Valentine’s Day.
A memorable childhood birthday was my sixth when, struck with a virus, I vomited across the kitchen floor and the whole thing was cancelled. From eight on they occurred during term-time at boarding school. Cards arrived at breakfast. At tea my friends banded around a cake encased in pink fondant. Literally encased. We convulsed in a collective sugar high and then went to bed. (All pupils had the same routine).
Since then they’ve been marked mostly with ambivalence. For a while I had a friend who celebrated her own birthday on mine (though hers was three days later). “I’ll get you a cake,” she’d say to entice me to come over. And then wouldn’t. “Oh, it’s her birthday too!” She’d remember as everyone put on coats. Actually, I didn’t mind. I was happy to avoid the date. Jesus, if I were to have a party, it would never be on the inauspicious day itself.
My favourite Christmases were those that were non-Christmases — those when I volunteered to work, or the one I had eating Chinese food on a beach in Bahia Brazil, or in the Middle East where it passed blessedly unnoticed. All the best New Year’s Eves I was asleep before midnight.
What is it about dates, though? There’s the pressure, obviously, the sense that everything should be perfect, a heightened anticipation that too often precipitates disappointment — or crisis. Dates are a wormhole too: instant access to intense emotion from the past — good and bad. We all have dates that are joyous — my children’s birthdays are three.
December 19 is love, for me. Others I recall with agony (June 11) or with grief (August 30: my cousin was killed in a motorbike accident aged 22).
source - https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/my-birthday-is-yet-another-occasion-i-m-meant-to-celebrate-plenty-of-other-dates-have-greater-a4050511.html
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