Today is my birthday.
When you are very young birthdays are special occasions. But, at my age, there have been so many that they are inclined to matter rather less.
I celebrated this morning by cleaning my glasses. I do this every year whether they need it or not. This was followed up with a celebratory bowl of cornflakes with a sprinkling of ‘All Bran’ covered in the sliced up discs of two bananas.
In other words, it is a day like any other.
Now? I sit here tapping out these words one by one in a painfully slow manner as befits an aircraft engineer using the ‘hunt & peck’ system of typing.
As a special treat I may decide to draw another cartoon for the second ‘Jet Engine’ book that deals with engine systems. Or not.
It is my birthday so I will decide what the priorities are today.
My wife produced a magnificent vegetable pie for lunch. There were no candles on it but it did contain a prodigious variety of veggies in a béchamel sauce topped with a large chunk of perfect puff pastry.
Many years ago a neighbour, Carol, decided to bake a birthday cake for me. I was 43. The cake was in the shape of a house.
There was one candle for each year of my life.
“Blow out the candles,” they called out – from a distance.
The heat drove me back but I succeeded, eventually, in extinguishing all the candles with nothing more than my breath!
The remains of the candles were in almost one lump and the icing on the cake had become crisp.
But the cake was superb.
A lovely cake and a lovely memory.
Thank you, Carol, for that.
Birthdays.
So many.
So few stay in the memory.
Two years ago we went to Kuching.
“Where,” they asked me, “Do you want to go for your birthday?”
“Kuching.”
“Why?”
“I want to see if it has changed much over the last fifty years.”
“Oh. OK, then.”
We went to Kuching.
We saw the orang utans and went for a trip up the river and back on a pleasure boat.
We had wonderful food and a palatial room at the ‘Hilton’ – courtesy of the management who had been informed by ‘Beloved Of Mine’ that it was a seventieth birthday trip.
Everyone should see the orang utans.
It is not like seeing them on TV.
It is special.
As was that birthday.
One is aware that there are less birthdays to come than have been enjoyed in the past; that is a given.
This one is quiet – and all the better for that.
