My friends range in age from 30 to 86, but naturally there’s a concentration around my own age, and few of us threw parties. Children can also find birthdays hard: so much anticipation; the hope and fear of so much attention; the pressure of being a year more grown-up, which is sometimes exciting and sometimes unwelcome. It’s sometimes hard to tell what it means when someone says they don’t want any fuss about their birthday. Do they truly find attention embarrassing, feel afraid of ageing and would rather repress the whole business? Enough fun happened, partly because I shamelessly named the quality and quantity of what I wanted.
