My 7 year old was very impressed yesterday. He thought the two minute silence at 11am was in honour of my birthday. I tried to explain that the significance was much more important than me, but he wasn’t particularly interested. I understand that. I wasn’t interested in old people talking about the war for years. Now I feel differently. Partly because I’m getting older and the stories are more relevant and partly because I have children.
When we were living in Australia, I went to a war memorial on my birthday and once a year, on the 11th of the 11th at exactly 11am, a shaft of sunlight shines on a memorial stone and highlights a roll of honour. It was an amazing thing to watch.
I had such a great birthday – my daughter, as predicted had gone to a huge amount of trouble with my presents. She had wrapped them all beautifully and put them in to three piles – one pile from her, one pile from the boys and one pile from all of them together – turns out she bought all three piles. Slightly worryingly she bought me some napkins which you can hand to the taxi driver when you’re too drunk to talk saying where you want to go and ticking whether your money is:-
a)in your bag
b)in your pocket
c)in your thong
She also bought me some “dog breath” chewing gum, because I’d mentioned breathing all over my poor.clients. My teenage son actually said “does it really give you dog breath? Why would you want to eat those?”.
I went to watch my 7 year old lose his football game, standing on the sidelines with a hideous cup of coffee, listening to competitive dads shout things like “EXPLOIT THE SPACE FOR GODS SAKE”!!! What does that mean??? What are they talking about? The boys are bloody 7 years old.
Then we went to watch my teenage son win his game and although I don’t love watching football, I felt very happy to be watching my lovely boys running about on my birthday.
Got back home to find that the boiler had broken so my filthy boys had to spend all day in their football kit as no hot water.
My brother and parents arrived and cooked lunch – more presents! Including bizarrely some weasel coffee which we had to drink…the coffee beans are regurgitated from a Vietnamese weasel and then roasted. Tasted OK though.
More friends arrived with presents – I love having my own house – it was packed and chaotic and cold, but full of warmth thanks to all my lovely friends and family and that is the main thing. Clearly everybody should have a stint at being homeless because it makes you very appreciative of the smaller things in life.
Happy, happy, happy (birthday to me).
