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 Mañana. 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.

Posted by misteraitch at November 11, 2002 04:18 PM