There are some things that you will always remember, I will always remember how my home-made birthday cake was entirely eaten and replaced with an exact replica. Exact! Sometimes the womanly urge to devour anything sweet and calorific as if it's going to spontaneously combust really does boggle me. Surely the effort of baking, and icing and arranging chocolate buttons is not worth the two slices to be chowed-down on over a pyjama party with Love, Actually? This is not love, no, but a product of the desperate, malicious mind of the cake-o-holic woman.
You know your birthdays start to mean that time is actually passing when your mum falls asleep at a stand-up show. (Still smiling though, perhaps in a constant reposnse to the jokes about rape and disease, but probably just happy to be warm and sitting down.) Or when you're consolling intoxicated friends who think they're life has already gone to shit, there's no going back from here, apparently. Or when a modest multi-pack of Wotsits and a few burnt sausage rolls get replaced with vol-au-vents and tequila sunrise...The clock has started to tick.
I think from here everything should go pretty fast. The monotonous years of polo shirts and petis filous sucked away decades, where getting up at seven meant that lunch was at 12, and the six days, twenty-three hours until another episode of the O.C could have been a lifetime. Some events now go by without being talked about, or planned in the backs of exercise books. Doing things alone means more things to talk about and more things to talk about means that time does run out.
