It's my birthday !!

It’s my birthday today.

I am rather like a small child when it comes to birthdays, and see them as an opportunity to celebrate with expensive presents and lots of chocolate cake and cream. Oh, and wine as well!

Last year was a big zero birthday (yes, thirty again!) and I was spoiled rotten, with a hog roast party in the garden, flying lesson in a light aircraft and some nice pressies. I had a wonderful time but obviously you can’t do that every year and so this time it will be rather more low key.

I’m not sure what we will be doing as I write, but we both have the day off and if the weather is kind we will probably take a trip to Camden Market with some spending money and then a nice meal in the evening. If it’s raining I think we may go to the National Maritime Museum to see the Canaletto painting of the pageant on the Thames that they have on display for the first time in the UK since it was painted in 1752!

And I have chosen my main present, which is a 160GB ipod in silver (I wanted a black one but they don’t make them any more – or so the guy in Comet [“You know where to come”] said, but them perhaps he had lots of silver ones to shift!) with lots of room for all my music and capacity to download a few films for boring plane journeys.

It’s nice having a summer birthday. I feel really sorry for people that have winter birthdays, especially those very close to Christmas, as it makes for a very long gap between celebrations and pressies and it’s never possible to have a party in the garden (unless you ask all your guests to come in ski gear to keep warm!). Having a birthday in the summer means my gifts are nicely spaced out about six months apart and more often than not it is nice enough to at least barbeque at lunch time.

Of course another birthday marks a time when (as my cheerful mother used to say) you are just one year older and closer to the grave! But today’s 50 is yesterday’s 40 and the day before’s 30, such are the advances of healthcare, nutrition and life expectancy, so I am not quite as pessimistic as her. I fully intend to enjoy many more years and – good luck permitting and dreadful diseases avoided - live well into my eighties, act disgracefully and embarrass my children constantly. That means I ought to be able to expect at least 30 to 35 more birthdays on which to be indulged and the centre of attention, which sounds fine.

And I have many more things I want to do! I want to live abroad for a few years as a leisurely retiree, I want to write creatively for fun and for money, I want to paint and I want to be able to live life for a while instead of the treadmill of working with the brief respites of holidays. I want to travel (but in luxury, not roughing it), experience new things and meet new people. So I need to live a whole lot longer.

So I am proposing to enjoy today completely and have high expectations of being spoiled again and spending some quality time with The Hubby doing nice things. And I will, yet again, make resolutions to change my life for the better – pay off debts, enjoy more quality time together with people I care about, get fitter and eat less. I said the same last year and the year before and have failed dismally. But this year I will be better, honestly, I will, or I am painfully aware I may not live long enough to do all those nice things I have ambitions about.

And that would be a shame!