As a child, I went through a stubborn, rebellious and insufferable phase. This manifested in several ways which I will not expand on here.
For the purposes of this short piece, I wish to focus on the specific period of 18 months or so wherein I developed a hatred of the notion of the birthday.
What’s the point? I shouted, quite stubbornly and not a little rebelliously. It’s just like any other day.
I viewed it as the marking of an arbitrary thing, the passing of a specific number of days since a very specific biological event. The celebration of a birthday was a denial of a basic truth, a naive implication that things mattered, and that the mundane and the quotidian could be imbued with meaning.
Thankfully, this sanctimonious and insufferable phase of my adolescence was short-lived (but did sadly encapsulate two of my own birthdays).
I realised later than expected that to celebrate a birthday is to convey a collective happiness about two (categories of) things:
(1) What the person being feted has done in their time
(2) The fact that they are still kicking around
To say happy birthday to a living person, then, might be loosely translated as:
“Well done. I’m glad you’re still here”.
This is why cake, balloons, singing are profoundly important things, perhaps the most important things on earth. Tell the people who are still here that you are glad of it! For there are plenty of people who we can no longer tell.
We are proud of all the things we have done over the last three years. We have worked hard to curate what we hope is a welcoming (and frequently nonsensical) space for stories. Secondly, there have been very real challenges along the road where we considered whether we wanted to continue running these events.
In more ways than one, we are glad to still be here.
We hope you’ll come and celebrate with us next week. Thursday 15 October, The Blue Monk on Enid Street in Bermondsey. We commence at 7.30pm prompt.
And yes, there are ten discounted tickets here for birthday believers. Code is BELIEVE.
See you there.