How Old Are You Now?

I don’t know where the idea that I deserve a birthday fuss comes from, but every year I secretly hope for it, and every year I am disappointed. Even if there is a fuss – and in the years when I lived in DC, I could count on my best friend, whose birthday was the week before, to make one – I am usually disappointed by some person or another who has forgotten the day completely. For some reason, it never helps that there’s also always one or two people I am completely surprised (and touched) that remembered.

I haven’t done anything special for my birthday in London since 2003, when I threw a big party in my flat to celebrate my birthday and that I’d finished the manuscript for my book. In those days, I was still too new to London to worry about how people would mix, and I invited almost everyone I’d ever met and was shocked when the flat was so full people were spilling onto the stairs and outside. The next year I was working in Cannes – which ranks up with the first birthday I had in DC and the first birthday my mother forgot as the worst birthdays ever – and last year I was in India with my sister.

This year I didn’t get around to planning anything much, but a couple of friends nagged me that I had to do something. So we did posh birthday the Saturday night before the actual day: drinks at Claridges and dinner at China Tang at the Dorchester (the only restaurant I have ever been to where there is a voice reciting Wordsworth playing in the bathroom). I’m not sure what kind of omen it is – if any – that across the room at Claridges was a guy I went on a date with three years ago, who’s apparently now married and was there with his wife.

Yesterday – the actual day – I was meeting up with a friend just because, you know, you can’t sit home on your birthday. She kept the details a surprise and sent me a message saying I was having a “very British birthday” – which I took to mean lots of liquor and no food. (In a sign that I am truly aging, I was slightly worried about the prospect, as I had to be at the Eurostar terminal by 6 a.m. this morning for an assignment in Paris.)

Instead it was Tower 42 – which I have always wanted to go to, but never managed – and a curry on Brick Lane. Can’t get much more British than that. But I didn’t really enjoy it: I was tired, not to mention distracted, keeping an ear peeled for a text message or phone call from this year’s Official People Who Determine Whether Or Not I Feel Loved on My Birthday (an ever changing honor, and I’m not always quite sure what determines it). Nope. Better luck next year, I guess.