Strange things, birthdays.
As the figures of my birthdays grow significant, I always dread the date - wish it would go away. For years I did just that: went away for my birthday. I thought that if I wasn't home to open my cards, and avoided seeing friends and family, I could just pretend it wasn't happening. But the problem persisted. Holidays are never quite what I long for them to be because I always have to take myself along. It's very frustrating. I wish holidays could be the ultimate out-of-body experience: that you could take a holiday from yourself as well as from the routines and restrictions of your everyday life. But it never works like that. The first time I went to Paris was when I was 16. Walking along the Boulevard St Michel, enthralled at discovering that the language and the places I'd learned about in school actually existed in real life, I heard the following line yelled across a picturesque cafe-filled square, by a large, blonde American woman to her husband at the end of what had clearly been a lengthy argument:
'Hank: I'll say it again. You're a bum in Cincinnati, you're a bum in Berlin, you're a bum in Venice, and hell - now you're a bum in Paris!'
It was my first experience of the delight of eavesdropping abroad but more than that - it was the moment at which I saw the answer to all those discussions about whether travel broadens the mind. Your passport can be so full of stamps that you need extension pages, but it doesn't matter. You can pass ports but you can't pass beyond yourself - and if you can, it can happen just as much at home as in whatever city of romance you've chosen to visit. Halfway across the world wasn't enough for Hank and his wife: he was still a bum, and she was still angry. All the way around the world and back wouldn't be far enough to escape ageing - ignoring an adult birthday really was no solution.
So now I do birthdays to please everybody else. Family members, friends... whoever wants to celebrate it, is welcome to do so. I don't do parties, though: anyone who expects to jump out of a cake in my honour should reschedule their plans. Anyone considering badly painted sheets on local roundabouts, embarrassing childhood photos in local papers or terribly witty requests on local radio might need to consider whether they wish to retain the friendship after the event. I'm much too difficult for that kind of extravaganza. To my mind, the only relevant PDA is the Personal Digital Assistant, not the Public Display of Affection. And anyway, that kind of conspicuous display of mutual appreciation is far more about the addresser than the addressee: 'look how great I am, sending you this greeting' as opposed to 'look how great you are and how much people like you'. No: I prefer to do birthdays now as a kind of family get-together: as the excuse rather than the reason. If there are candles on the cake I try to get them extinguished as quickly as I can, and go back to being just someone at the gathering rather than its focus - hiding behind smoke and laughter, not illuminated by just how many candles are burning in front of me.
I'm awkward like that. I know. I think it dates back to childhood, and having a birthday right in the middle of the summer holidays meaning that, if my parents decided to organise a party for me, chances were most people wouldn't turn up and you know - luck would have it that the very people who happened to be away in Majorca or Connemara or wherever just so happened to be the people I most wanted to be there. But it's not as simple as that. It's something about ageing. When I was 6, I overheard our neighbour telling my parents that his eldest daughter had passed all her O levels and was going to go back to school and do A levels. I remember asking my mum afterwards what that meant. She explained that these were exams you did when you were older - much older - 16 and 18. I was enthralled. I wanted to do O levels. They sounded so glamorous. A levels just seemed beyond what I could even imagine. They sounded a bit too grown up - a bit like when I tried to walk in my mum's high heeled shoes and fell over onto the sofa: a little bit adventurous just yet. I couldn't wait to be 16 and doing O levels. When I was 16 I wanted to do my A levels and dreamed about going away to university, having a boyfriend, and being able to dress however I wanted. At 18, A levels and university entrance exams were within reach of my fingertips and I remember feeling scared... university would mean leaving home and suddenly I didn't feel nearly as grown-up as I remember thinking the neighbours' daughters were all those years ago. I felt as though someone had played a trick on me... as though I'd seen everyone looking grown-up ahead of me but, now it was my turn, I didn't feel ready for adult life at all. I wanted to grow up some more, because what lay ahead of me was scary...
... and sometime in my twenties, I can't remember when, I started wishing myself younger again. It's funny, ageing. You want to look older, be older, for so long, and then you suddenly meet your older self and think: no thanks. I'd like to be younger again, actually, thanks very much... and you try to do the portrait in the attic thing with face creams and hair colours and strategic wardrobe manouevres. You join a gym. You might avoid the aggression of the Body Combat class but that's just what you're doing there. Body combat. Trying to combat the signals of defeat sent out to you by your body - broadening, slowing, wrinkling. You're denying the weight-gain and the aches and pains and the inevitable. You're on the treadmill of denial on an upward incline: going nowhere, fast...
... and you start to dread your birthday. When I turned 18, I was offered a free birthday party in a nightclub called Paradise Lost. It wasn't an offer of an evening with John Milton; it was a case of the Europa Hotel ('the most bombed hotel in Europe' at the time) trying to boost its business as Northern Ireland's 'Troubles' slowed down. I didn't take them up on their offer, though ironically I do remember getting caught up in a serious bomb alert in Belfast city centre on my 18th birthday... to my shame and my friends' amusement at the time, I was there to return books to the Central Library. Nowadays, birthdays are more likely to bring special offers on reading glasses, anti-ageing creams or fitness consultations. As they end, you're definitely more likely to feel a sense of relief than regret - thank God that's over for another year, rather than oh no... another whole year to wait until it's my birthday again!
When I say I'm dreading my birthday, a sage voice nearby usually says something about being grateful for every day, or being grateful to have lived another year in good health and with family members still around, or words to that effect. I know that these are the right answers to the Ordinary Level of ageing. But sometimes the right answers don't add up to how we feel. Sometimes we just wish we could escape back to our younger, lither, lighter, carefree selves. Go back to a time when the answer to 'where do you see yourself in ten years' time' wasn't a depressing one. When the terrible inevitability of the chords and words of 'Happy Birthday to you' seemed joyful and light-hearted, rather than the dirge of predictable repetition which it feels like now.
Coming to terms with your own significant figures, and getting ageing right. Now that's Advanced Level.
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