...Or how I learned to stop worrying and started to appreciate life.
For the six months leading up to my 30th birthday, life had been really rather shitty. I was still trying to get over my recent divorce and had had to leave London and suspended my studies for a year so that I could sort my head out.
I had moved up north, to North Anston, near Rotherham. My best friend Ali lived there with his lovely wife, Jules, and he had come to my rescue when I needed to get London and everything associated with it out of my head. I stayed with them for a little while and then moved into a little one-bedroomed flat across the street - the only time in my life I have ever had an entire flat to myself.
Ali had introduced me to a friend of his that owned a restaurant and I managed to get myself a job there, working as a chef. I've always been good at cooking and had even worked as a cook in a pub kitchen before, but this was something new to me and, although I was there for a short time, I learned quite a lot.
So... life was ticking along. I was still messed up over the divorce and as my birthday drew nearer, I began to reflect about where my life was and where it was going. University had already taken much longer than it should have and I'd had to repeat my second year twice already - the first time after being attacked in the university bar and having my face smashed in, then, while I was trying to get over the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that it caused, my Grandmother died, after a prolonged illness. It knocked me flat on my arse again.
The PTSD probably made dealing with my Gran's death a lot harder than it should have been. It ended up being just one more reason that I couldn't get my head round the studying.
My conte
mplation about the preceding decade had lead me to decide that, actually, my twenties weren't all that. I wasn't where I had imagined I would be in life, I hadn't achieved all that I had dreamed of when I was 19. Plus, I wasn't getting any younger. Like most people, I didn't look as good as I used to. I wasn't as fit as I used to be. I was getting wrinkly! It's a pretty depressing place to be. My world was crashing in about my ears.
There weren't any concrete plans made for my birthday yet and it was only brought home to me how close it was when Ali's birthday came round all too soon. His birthday is exactly a month before mine and I had taken great pleasure over the years by giving him earache about how old he was. I'd done it to him every year since we were 19. I'd gotten quite creative with it too. After several years of having a whole month of me making jokes about him being yet another year older, he was hardened to my jibes.
One year - I think it was when he turned 26 - I had a flash of inspiration in response to his resistance to giving me a rise. I turned to him and uttered a phrase that I know has bugged him ever since: "You know the best thing about doing this to you? It's never going to be your turn!" He went nuts. The mere thought of not ever being allowed to direct the same ribbing towards me narked him. Which probably means it's just as well for me that he's not bigger than I am and that he has a bloody good sense of humour.
Ali had a 30th birthday party at his house, which I enjoyed, but it only served to make my ominous feelings stronger. Rather than it being the sort of tear-up we had been used to in previous years, it was mainly his family in attendance and it resembled the sorts of family birthday parties I remember the 'old folks' in my family having when I was a kid. Of course, the fact that Ali and I ended up drunkenly dancing around in his diningroom to Cotton Eye Joe, only came flooding back to me in a wave of cringe-worthy 'morning after' shame. We really had turned into that 'someones Dad' figure that dances around at weddings and birthdays insisting:"Look kids! Yer old man's still got it, eh?"
Strangely enough, I gave Ali very little in the way of ageist abuse during April that year. I knew what was coming and I didn't like it one little bit. The nearer it got to the end of the month, the more depressed I felt.
Now, I bet you're wondering where this is going, since this is in my Top 10 of great moments from my life so far.
There was something to look forward to. A friend from university, Carrie, had gotten in touch at the start of the year and she and her husband-to-be, Mattie, had invited me down to Bedford for my birthday. Ali worked almost every friday and saturday night anyway, so I figured that he would be busy. I made my way down there on the saturday morning, even thou
gh my birthday was the sunday. I thought why not make a weekend of it?
It was a beautifully hot and sunny day the first time I set foot in Bedford. Mattie had come to meet me at the station and was to make sure I didn't get lost finding the others. The walk from the train station to the pub that she was in was just the right side of being too long for the heat and sun we were bathed in. The reception I got from Carrie was, as usual, as warm as the weather outside. One of the reasons that she and I were such good friends is down to her having the same sense of humour as Ali and myself, which meant that I wasn't surprised when she launched straight into how old and fat I was looking. Despite my feeling depressed about it all, this was the sort of banter that never really causes any offence. If anything, the irreverent nature of it, bizarrely, made me feel more relaxed.
We had a couple
of drinks, had a laugh, did our catching up and then we went back to their flat, which was a small place upstairs from a dingy little club called The Angel. I was staying over, so I dumped my bag there, had a shower and got myself ready for that evening. I had already met Mattie some months before, but other than him and Carrie, I didn't know anybody. I was still made to feel very welcome and we went out in Bedford and had a fun night getting drunk and acting silly.
I can only vaguely remember carrying Mattie down the street, over my shoulder, at the end of the night. While I was doing so, we bumped into to a bunch of Carrie's friends. Among them was Almo, an absolute giant of a man, who I had no idea was going to end up my landlord and housemate later that summer. After being told to put Mattie down, we weaved a path through the human traffic back to The Angel, via the kebab shop across the street, and went upstairs.
They went straight off to bed and I went through to the spare room and out onto the flat roof above the nightclub for a cigarette, it being a non-smoking flat. I don't really remember what time it was when we got back there, but I do remember being awake for the rest of the night and sat outside, on the garden furniture that Carrie and Mattie had built on their 'roof garden'.
By now, it was well past midnight and we were officially into my birthday. I was born at 5:37 a.m. and have had the very odd habit of being awake at that exact time, either by accident or design, for almost every birthday I can remember. Sure enough, as the first rays of sun were just beginning to kiss the chimney tops, I was sat there, alone, on the roof of the club, the slightly sozzled feeling just wearing off. I began to think about what it meant now that I had reached this milestone. I tried to remember turning twenty and couldn't remember it specifically. The kinds of thoughts I was having were a world away from what I had been feeling back then.
At 20, I couldn't wait for the following year, so that I could have a big party and have everyone make a fuss of me, and so that I needn't have to worry about getting ID'd for nightclubs. Now that I was 30, I was full of mourning for the loss of my twenties and sad at how quickly they'd come and gone.
The night of my 21st birthday, my uncle and I had sat in his house and drank a really nice bottle of Glenmorangie between us. He told me something that night that I didn't pay any attention to at the time. He said: "The next 365 days are going to go by so fast; it'll make your head spin." It didn't really mean much at the time, but, the day I turned 22, I got home from work and was getting ready for the night out ahead when the phone rang. I picked it up to hear a voice say: "Told you." What was most annoying about it was that, not only did I know who it was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It felt like he had told me about how fast it was going to go by only the day before.
The years only get faster and faster and I had now hit 30 a lot faster than I felt I should have. It was like the last decade had been a blur. Then I began think of it like this: I hadn't enjoyed my twenties and I didn't want to be sat there at 5:37 a.m. on my 40th birthday ruin
g the fact that I hadn't enjoyed being 30. After all, when I got to that age, I was surely going to look back and wish I was 30 again, wasn't I? I started to realise that every milestone age was going to leave me wishing I was younger than I was and that from this moment onwards I would view 30 as being a lot younger than I did for the six months leading up to it.
Something in me changed there and then. I had made the conscious decision to enjoy being 30 for the sake of being 30. I was never going to be that age again, so why not enjoy it for what it was? When I looked back on some of my happier years, I had enjoyed being 18 just for the sake of it - even if it didn't mean exactly that to me at the time. I vowed to make the next ten years better than the last and, almost instantly, I stopped worrying about it. It was like a huge, dark cloud had cleared and revealed the beautiful sunrise I saw before me.
I went to bed and rewoke around midday to hear Carrie and Mattie moving around the flat, having showers and various other morning stuff. I got myself up, washed and came out of the room to meet them. I had been expecting some sort of build up to another night out - it was, after all, now officially my birthday. It came as a bit of a disappointment then when Carrie asked me to hurry up getting myself in order because she and Mattie were off round to his parents for sunday lunch. I shouldn't have been so self-centred about it, but I had just assumed that ,when she had invited me down on the saturday, we were simply making a weekend of it.
We all said our goodbyes and they dropped me off at the train station. I hope they didn't see the disappointment I was feeling, but I also know that I'm pretty crap at hiding these things; it's usually written all over my face.
The biggest surprise of the day was when I got back to Yorkshire and discovered that Ali had had his gig cancelled and that he and Jules weren't busy.
When my ex-wife and I had split, we did the usual division of possessions. I hadn't really given it much thought myself, but I had gotten custody of our large set of poker chips, so that night we got ourselves set up for a bit of poker and some drinks. Ali had a large piece of green baize that he used for gigging (after being accused of scratching pub and club tables with his equipment one too many times) and we threw that over his diningroom table to make a fairly realistic looking card table. Ali figured that it just wouldn't be poker unless we had a large bottle of Jack Daniels to go with it, so after a quick trip up to the local shop for booze and nibbles, we sat down and started playing.
None of us is very good at poker, but I had been playing for a little longer than both of them and I started winning a lot of the chips, mainly down to some ill-advised betting by the others. I did my best to let them in on any little nuggets of information I remembered as we were going along to try and even the odds - we weren't playing for money, after all. One of the things I imparted was that a lot of the time, you're not really playing the cards, but rather what peoples reactions tell you and also that I had learned that poker seemed to be 95% psychology to me. I could be wrong, but that's how I look at it.
As the evening wore on,
it turned into humorous farce. I, apparently, have a really annoying habit of picking up a stack of about ten chips and just clicking them through my fingers. It drives Ali mental and Jules found it quite distracting as well. Ali, for his part, discovered that when he laid the cards out in the middle of the table, if he laid them out all square to each other, except for the last one, that I couldn't leave it alone. I didn't even realise that I was reaching over and straightening it up until several hands had gone by and I couldn't figure out what the two of them were laughing at so much.
We played. We drank. We laughed. We took the piss out of each other. It was everything that a birthday spent with close friends should be. It went on until Jules looked at the time and shocked us by announcing that it was after 4 a.m. She was supposed to be going to work in the morning! Ali and I stayed up about an hour after Jules went to bed and had a few cigarettes in the garden and a few more JDs. When we finally floated off to bed, I drifted off to sleep on their sofa with a big, contented smile on my face.
All in all, it had turned out to be one of the best birthdays I have ever had. For having had no plans made at all, the few friends I still had nearby had made it a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. Over the years, I have had many different kinds of birthdays, but you can't over-estimate the value of these kinds of nights. I can only hope there are many more of them.
For the six months leading up to my 30th birthday, life had been really rather shitty. I was still trying to get over my recent divorce and had had to leave London and suspended my studies for a year so that I could sort my head out.
I had moved up north, to North Anston, near Rotherham. My best friend Ali lived there with his lovely wife, Jules, and he had come to my rescue when I needed to get London and everything associated with it out of my head. I stayed with them for a little while and then moved into a little one-bedroomed flat across the street - the only time in my life I have ever had an entire flat to myself.
Ali had introduced me to a friend of his that owned a restaurant and I managed to get myself a job there, working as a chef. I've always been good at cooking and had even worked as a cook in a pub kitchen before, but this was something new to me and, although I was there for a short time, I learned quite a lot.
So... life was ticking along. I was still messed up over the divorce and as my birthday drew nearer, I began to reflect about where my life was and where it was going. University had already taken much longer than it should have and I'd had to repeat my second year twice already - the first time after being attacked in the university bar and having my face smashed in, then, while I was trying to get over the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) that it caused, my Grandmother died, after a prolonged illness. It knocked me flat on my arse again.
The PTSD probably made dealing with my Gran's death a lot harder than it should have been. It ended up being just one more reason that I couldn't get my head round the studying.
My conte
mplation about the preceding decade had lead me to decide that, actually, my twenties weren't all that. I wasn't where I had imagined I would be in life, I hadn't achieved all that I had dreamed of when I was 19. Plus, I wasn't getting any younger. Like most people, I didn't look as good as I used to. I wasn't as fit as I used to be. I was getting wrinkly! It's a pretty depressing place to be. My world was crashing in about my ears.There weren't any concrete plans made for my birthday yet and it was only brought home to me how close it was when Ali's birthday came round all too soon. His birthday is exactly a month before mine and I had taken great pleasure over the years by giving him earache about how old he was. I'd done it to him every year since we were 19. I'd gotten quite creative with it too. After several years of having a whole month of me making jokes about him being yet another year older, he was hardened to my jibes.
One year - I think it was when he turned 26 - I had a flash of inspiration in response to his resistance to giving me a rise. I turned to him and uttered a phrase that I know has bugged him ever since: "You know the best thing about doing this to you? It's never going to be your turn!" He went nuts. The mere thought of not ever being allowed to direct the same ribbing towards me narked him. Which probably means it's just as well for me that he's not bigger than I am and that he has a bloody good sense of humour.
Ali had a 30th birthday party at his house, which I enjoyed, but it only served to make my ominous feelings stronger. Rather than it being the sort of tear-up we had been used to in previous years, it was mainly his family in attendance and it resembled the sorts of family birthday parties I remember the 'old folks' in my family having when I was a kid. Of course, the fact that Ali and I ended up drunkenly dancing around in his diningroom to Cotton Eye Joe, only came flooding back to me in a wave of cringe-worthy 'morning after' shame. We really had turned into that 'someones Dad' figure that dances around at weddings and birthdays insisting:"Look kids! Yer old man's still got it, eh?"
Strangely enough, I gave Ali very little in the way of ageist abuse during April that year. I knew what was coming and I didn't like it one little bit. The nearer it got to the end of the month, the more depressed I felt.
Now, I bet you're wondering where this is going, since this is in my Top 10 of great moments from my life so far.
There was something to look forward to. A friend from university, Carrie, had gotten in touch at the start of the year and she and her husband-to-be, Mattie, had invited me down to Bedford for my birthday. Ali worked almost every friday and saturday night anyway, so I figured that he would be busy. I made my way down there on the saturday morning, even thou
gh my birthday was the sunday. I thought why not make a weekend of it?It was a beautifully hot and sunny day the first time I set foot in Bedford. Mattie had come to meet me at the station and was to make sure I didn't get lost finding the others. The walk from the train station to the pub that she was in was just the right side of being too long for the heat and sun we were bathed in. The reception I got from Carrie was, as usual, as warm as the weather outside. One of the reasons that she and I were such good friends is down to her having the same sense of humour as Ali and myself, which meant that I wasn't surprised when she launched straight into how old and fat I was looking. Despite my feeling depressed about it all, this was the sort of banter that never really causes any offence. If anything, the irreverent nature of it, bizarrely, made me feel more relaxed.
We had a couple
of drinks, had a laugh, did our catching up and then we went back to their flat, which was a small place upstairs from a dingy little club called The Angel. I was staying over, so I dumped my bag there, had a shower and got myself ready for that evening. I had already met Mattie some months before, but other than him and Carrie, I didn't know anybody. I was still made to feel very welcome and we went out in Bedford and had a fun night getting drunk and acting silly.I can only vaguely remember carrying Mattie down the street, over my shoulder, at the end of the night. While I was doing so, we bumped into to a bunch of Carrie's friends. Among them was Almo, an absolute giant of a man, who I had no idea was going to end up my landlord and housemate later that summer. After being told to put Mattie down, we weaved a path through the human traffic back to The Angel, via the kebab shop across the street, and went upstairs.
They went straight off to bed and I went through to the spare room and out onto the flat roof above the nightclub for a cigarette, it being a non-smoking flat. I don't really remember what time it was when we got back there, but I do remember being awake for the rest of the night and sat outside, on the garden furniture that Carrie and Mattie had built on their 'roof garden'.
By now, it was well past midnight and we were officially into my birthday. I was born at 5:37 a.m. and have had the very odd habit of being awake at that exact time, either by accident or design, for almost every birthday I can remember. Sure enough, as the first rays of sun were just beginning to kiss the chimney tops, I was sat there, alone, on the roof of the club, the slightly sozzled feeling just wearing off. I began to think about what it meant now that I had reached this milestone. I tried to remember turning twenty and couldn't remember it specifically. The kinds of thoughts I was having were a world away from what I had been feeling back then.
At 20, I couldn't wait for the following year, so that I could have a big party and have everyone make a fuss of me, and so that I needn't have to worry about getting ID'd for nightclubs. Now that I was 30, I was full of mourning for the loss of my twenties and sad at how quickly they'd come and gone.
The night of my 21st birthday, my uncle and I had sat in his house and drank a really nice bottle of Glenmorangie between us. He told me something that night that I didn't pay any attention to at the time. He said: "The next 365 days are going to go by so fast; it'll make your head spin." It didn't really mean much at the time, but, the day I turned 22, I got home from work and was getting ready for the night out ahead when the phone rang. I picked it up to hear a voice say: "Told you." What was most annoying about it was that, not only did I know who it was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It felt like he had told me about how fast it was going to go by only the day before.
The years only get faster and faster and I had now hit 30 a lot faster than I felt I should have. It was like the last decade had been a blur. Then I began think of it like this: I hadn't enjoyed my twenties and I didn't want to be sat there at 5:37 a.m. on my 40th birthday ruin
g the fact that I hadn't enjoyed being 30. After all, when I got to that age, I was surely going to look back and wish I was 30 again, wasn't I? I started to realise that every milestone age was going to leave me wishing I was younger than I was and that from this moment onwards I would view 30 as being a lot younger than I did for the six months leading up to it.Something in me changed there and then. I had made the conscious decision to enjoy being 30 for the sake of being 30. I was never going to be that age again, so why not enjoy it for what it was? When I looked back on some of my happier years, I had enjoyed being 18 just for the sake of it - even if it didn't mean exactly that to me at the time. I vowed to make the next ten years better than the last and, almost instantly, I stopped worrying about it. It was like a huge, dark cloud had cleared and revealed the beautiful sunrise I saw before me.
I went to bed and rewoke around midday to hear Carrie and Mattie moving around the flat, having showers and various other morning stuff. I got myself up, washed and came out of the room to meet them. I had been expecting some sort of build up to another night out - it was, after all, now officially my birthday. It came as a bit of a disappointment then when Carrie asked me to hurry up getting myself in order because she and Mattie were off round to his parents for sunday lunch. I shouldn't have been so self-centred about it, but I had just assumed that ,when she had invited me down on the saturday, we were simply making a weekend of it.
We all said our goodbyes and they dropped me off at the train station. I hope they didn't see the disappointment I was feeling, but I also know that I'm pretty crap at hiding these things; it's usually written all over my face.
The biggest surprise of the day was when I got back to Yorkshire and discovered that Ali had had his gig cancelled and that he and Jules weren't busy.
When my ex-wife and I had split, we did the usual division of possessions. I hadn't really given it much thought myself, but I had gotten custody of our large set of poker chips, so that night we got ourselves set up for a bit of poker and some drinks. Ali had a large piece of green baize that he used for gigging (after being accused of scratching pub and club tables with his equipment one too many times) and we threw that over his diningroom table to make a fairly realistic looking card table. Ali figured that it just wouldn't be poker unless we had a large bottle of Jack Daniels to go with it, so after a quick trip up to the local shop for booze and nibbles, we sat down and started playing.
None of us is very good at poker, but I had been playing for a little longer than both of them and I started winning a lot of the chips, mainly down to some ill-advised betting by the others. I did my best to let them in on any little nuggets of information I remembered as we were going along to try and even the odds - we weren't playing for money, after all. One of the things I imparted was that a lot of the time, you're not really playing the cards, but rather what peoples reactions tell you and also that I had learned that poker seemed to be 95% psychology to me. I could be wrong, but that's how I look at it.
As the evening wore on,
it turned into humorous farce. I, apparently, have a really annoying habit of picking up a stack of about ten chips and just clicking them through my fingers. It drives Ali mental and Jules found it quite distracting as well. Ali, for his part, discovered that when he laid the cards out in the middle of the table, if he laid them out all square to each other, except for the last one, that I couldn't leave it alone. I didn't even realise that I was reaching over and straightening it up until several hands had gone by and I couldn't figure out what the two of them were laughing at so much.We played. We drank. We laughed. We took the piss out of each other. It was everything that a birthday spent with close friends should be. It went on until Jules looked at the time and shocked us by announcing that it was after 4 a.m. She was supposed to be going to work in the morning! Ali and I stayed up about an hour after Jules went to bed and had a few cigarettes in the garden and a few more JDs. When we finally floated off to bed, I drifted off to sleep on their sofa with a big, contented smile on my face.
All in all, it had turned out to be one of the best birthdays I have ever had. For having had no plans made at all, the few friends I still had nearby had made it a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. Over the years, I have had many different kinds of birthdays, but you can't over-estimate the value of these kinds of nights. I can only hope there are many more of them.
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