My thirtieth birthday celebrations were last week. They seemed to go on over several days, in a manner very similar to a royal birthday, and my, does that do something for the ego! The thing that stands out most of all, through the utter blur of exhaustion, is that it’s been one of the best birthdays ever!
My birthday meal was memorable, to say the least. My favourite little restaurant put on a live musician, to serenade us in Italian while we ate. The cake, while not a chocolate caterpillar cake, was one of the most spectacular creations I have ever seen. Definitely a cake to write home about. Not that I can complain that I was lacking a caterpillar cake. I had one of those on my actual birthday, where my workmates remembered that a birthday is not a real birthday without a caterpillar cake, and got me one!
Since I have very little in the way of a visual imagination, and my reflex is henceforth not to reach for the camera to snap a memory, there are no pictures, as far as I know, of the event. I like this. Photographs never make a memory for me. I can, if I so wish, gleam in my memories. A photo never does it justice, and I would spend any time looking over the photo realising that it didn’t match the memory. “My suit was greener than that, surely.” “Don’t I look old…”
What made the meal was not the chance to blatantly flirt with everyone in the room. IT was not being told I was stunning, which certainly helped to make my day. It wasn’t even the absolute barrage of winks and arch looks coming from the other end of the table. It was having so many people around me, old friends and new, just there for me. There are practically tears in my eyes as I write this.
But it just kept going, spilling out into Saturday, and a fantastic Harry Potter tour of the old town and a chance to show an old friend around the city I’ve fallen in love with. Whenever an old friend comes to visit nowadays, I do this. I feel like an over-enthusiastic boyfriend, introducing a shy partner. IT’s as though Edinburgh herself is my new beau. She has so much, and she keeps on giving. And I keep on gushing about her.
And on again into Sunday, into church and everything that that entails. Three days of absolute scintillation, attempting to be a comet, and blaze a trail across the sky. IT’s not every week I can manage a hat trick. I am perhaps pleased with that, because it’s rather exhausting. I’m feeling the need to collapse in bed with a good book. But today is back to the grindstone. Back to the old main drag.
What sticks in my head is this, “I feel like I did when I first went to uni.” I went back to Shetland, and I said I’m going to grow up. No more insane dreams. No more gleaming like a steam train in brilliant emerald. Just respectability, sensibility, boring, staid old grown-up life. And I hung up the flash, the brash, and the outright mad, and I tried to be something so banal it makes my teeth ache to think of it now.
When that didn’t work, I came a little unglued, but now, I’m back into the driving seat again. I did grow up, but I don’t think it took. I tried growing up, but I don’t think it’s for me. I might revisit it in ten years time or so. But for now, I’m back to channeling Byron. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Flash, brash, and mad as a spoon. Good Morning.