Today is my birthday.
This morning I went for a follow-up appointment with the surgeon who did my appendicectomy, and on the way home tried on some extraordinarily expensive shoes which I can’t afford but want to wear to our wedding (oh yes, I haven’t mentioned that, have I? Today also marks a year since he proposed, brave man). Tonight I will be going to work, while Deri goes out to celebrate one of our friends’ (not 30th) birthdays. Yesterday I withdrew from an application for a job I didn’t want, which means I will definitely be unemployed come August, and tomorrow I will be trying to sleep during the day, relying on hot milk with a large slug of Amaretto, a hot water bottle, and not much sleep for the past twenty-four hours.
All of which goes to show that life is what happens while you’re busy leading an ordinary day, and that the big and momentous scoot along quite happily with the unremarkable and the mundane in their sidecar.
Having a birthday so close to Christmas and New Year means that a lot of the big plans and grand gestures have been made recently, without time for a shakedown, so there isn’t much else for me to say here, except to answer the question a few people have asked recently, and I have also been asking myself, “Are you happy to be turning thirty?” to which the answer is definitely “Yes.” Maybe I’ll explore that a bit more in posts to come.
I also wanted to add a few things to my new year’s resolutions, from my lovely birthday cards:
Cliff Walk in Spring, Nicholas Hely Hutchinson, from my mum
“… and lots of coastal walks”
and from my aunt, textile design by Josef Hillerbrand for Edinburgh Weavers, 1933
“We wish you lots of luck and enjoyment in years to come.”
To coastal walks, luck, and enjoyment! And birthdays. Happy birthday me.
Happy 30th birthday! May this year bring you much joy and happiness, and many coastal walks too. :)
happy birthday! and happy engagement! and, also, hot milk with amaretto sounds like the greatest thing ever.
Thank you!
And, yes. It was my grandpa’s cold and flu remedy (!). When he had
to look after my dad when he was little (grandpa was a musician and my
granny a glamorous political activist, so they would tag-team the
childcare), any sign of a sniffle and he would make a big mug of this
and tuck him into bed with two eiderdowns and ten blankets “to sweat
it out.” Personally I prefer vitamin C, ginger, garlic and lots of
fluids, but for sleep it’s a dream. (Only when you need to sleep in
the daytime, though. It is otherwise dangerously addictive).
Happy birthday, Philippa! Your family are very good card-choosers. I must try the amaretto, now that I am grown-up and should no longer rely on Calpol Junior.
Well, I tried to write a comment on this post from my phone earlier on, but as well as somehow placing full-stops between every word instead of spaces, it concluded by deleting the whole thing! So here’s attempt number two.
I really loved reading this post and it made me feel rather content with the world. This is not just because I for one am rather happy that I’ll be 30 myself in a few months (and given that I think I was born with the mindset – albeit none of the wisdom – of a 70-to-80-year-old, 30 feels like an age where some progress through the years has been made and at which I suspect I might feel rather comfortable in my own skin). One’s twenties have always felt to me like a time to be got through and during which one is at best a work in progress and at worst in a constant state of trial-and-error. That sounds rather negative but it isn’t meant that way – it’s just that people take time to become themselves and I have always felt that one’s 30s might be a time of real contentment, or at least the beginning thereof. I suspect youth is always rather difficult to look back on, but a little time enables one to do just that without cringing too much, and to begin to build upon what may have seemed like errors and false starts, but were actually formative events in their own right, without which we wouldn’tbe able to sit here and reflect upon it all. I have been reading Yeats’ A Woman Young and Old quite a lot of late, and in my rather flawed and effortful attempts to understand it, I have come to grasp a few things, and one of them is that life can in many respects be viewed in stages, and that realising this can be rather helpful, particularly if a certain stage seems never-ending or unbearable or tedious or any of the other adjectives which life often seems to attract.
As for the way in which life happens – yes, you’re absolutely right, and I have huge faith in the role ordinary days play in helping us to grow and to grow up. There’s often something rather pleasing about seminal occasions being, additionally, the most everyday of days.
This message all sounds rather melancholy, which isn’t how it’s intended at all. Have just got home from work after the end of a very icy, snowy, chilly commute and I’m now feeling warm and cosy tucked up in several blankets on my sofa, and rather content. Hope you are too, down there in snowy London.
Happy belated birthday, Philippa!