My Last Dozen Birthdays

Today is my thirty-fourth birthday, which, unusually, I find myself celebrating in the same place as last year's, at the Hotel S_____. My wife bought me a lovely pocket-watch, some cologne, and a Playstation game. Last year we marked the occasion with a meal out at Nivå with Mr. B_______ and his then-girlfriend: this time around we'll be eating in, having surfeited on restaurant food in Edinburgh over the weekend. My thirty-second birthday was my first in Sweden: my mother and her boyfriend were in town to visit us at the waterside apartment where we lived at the time. My thirty-first birthday was my first as a married man: my love and I had been wed for less than a month: we were living in Surrey, and my father-in-law was with us having stayed over for a few weeks after the wedding. My thirtieth birthday, which fell on a workday when I was staying in Atherstone, Warwickshire, was the first I'd spent with my love - she had flown over to England for a few weeks after we'd found that we couldn't bear to be apart. My twenty-ninth fell during an anxious time shortly after my return from Italy: I spent it in Wales with my folks: we probably went out to one of the local pubs for a meal. My twenty-eighth and twenty-seventh were celebrated at different locales in the Eastern outskirts of Rome, the latter shortly after my arrival while I was still staying at an hotel, searching desperately for an apartment: I recall a power-cut plunged the hotel restaurant into darkness, so my colleagues and I enjoyed an impromptu candelight supper. I can't recall anything specific about the former, or indeed about my twenty-sixth, when I would have been living in Bristol. My twenty-fifth, if I remember rightly, saw me enjoying my first ever trip to Paris: I was amongst friends & having a blast. Contrarily, the one before, number twenty-four, was a bit miserable, and saw me suffering from a bad head cold and an intense shortage of money. No particular memory of birthday number twenty-three survives: I would have been living with my sister in Cardiff, still looking for a job.

Portraits of the Weblogger as a Young Man

Since we bought a new scanner a few months ago, we've had the option of digitizing and uploading some of our jumbled stock of photographs, which still occupy the motley bunch of plastic cases and paper folders they were first presented in, but which have since been quite thoroughly shuffled out of their original order. I felt the urge - don't ask me why - to digitally preserve, and publically present some old pictures of myself.

I'd find it hard to be sure at what age this first picture was taken - sixteen, perhaps? I had been coerced into helping out with some gardening work for a friend of the family. Look at the hair - oh dear. I only distantly recall the desperate awkwardness I felt at that age, but this image certainly helps me to reconstruct it - to such an extent that I find it almost painful to look at.

The curtains in the second picture place me in Fulham, in the scuzzy ground-floor flat I shared in '88/'89. I would have been nineteen or twenty years old. Again, the hair... - I guess I couldn't have cared much about how I looked. The balloon lady was assembled by two of my flatmates, for what occasion I don't recall... put three young nerds in a confined space that is still several years away from being connected to the internet, and this kind of thing is bound to happen, I guess.

The third image was taken nearly two years later, during a pub-crawl in Brighton, if I remember it right: most likely in August or September of '90. I think I must have changed a good deal between this picture, and the previous one - certainly I can recognise much more of my present-day self in this image than in the others. Judging from the way I'd fleshed out, my diet must have been mostly junkfood and beer around this time. I feel a little bit sorry for this chubby-faced fellow: he has no idea about the lean spell ahead of him.

Lastly, here is a besuited & haggard gent on a bench in Paris, circa '97, the weary veteran of a few lean spells. My pale & drawn appearance aside, I was having a fine old day in that beautiful city where an old friend (one of balloon-lady's makers, in fact) had just got married.