You see, I need to get this thing written and dispatched because I want to go to a birthday party.
Yes, yes, I know, but let me explain.
Birth is significant. The day before it, you don’t exist, and neither, for you, does the world.
Birth is hope. The child is a blank slate for the world to scribble on.
Except, of course, it isn’t blank; genes have already written plenty.
Nevertheless birth feels like a time of innocence. Every maternity ward rewrites the Book of Genesis several times a day.
The shine wears off, of course. The unique potential of the new-born grows into just another child.
But celebrating the birthday every year is a way of buffing that innocence again. This day, my child, is yours and yours alone.
Except, of course, that it’s not. There are 8 billion of us and only 365 birthdays to go round. We each share our date of birth with 22 million others. And that’s just the living ones.
The dead are just as numerous and often more interesting. I’m in with Hitler.
As kids we want to get older. Every year offers new privileges, new independence, new powers.
But oh, how long it takes to drag from one birthday to the next. Time moves with the speed of tectonic plates.
I was 7 for a decade, my longed-for eighth birthday a speck on the horizon, a dotlet.
The childhood party balloons, the cake and candles, the presents, the first bike, all suggest advancement towards a goal. They announce that progress is being made, that the passage of time is conferring benefits.
Every year is a notch in the belt, a brick on the pile, a dollar in the bank, a thing worth having. The implicit aim would seem to be adulthood, the day when the apron strings snap like the cracking of a whip and you finally step out on to the wide savannah of being grown up, free to go where you will with the wind in your hair and to have children of your own, to restart the cycle.
The point is keeping on keeping on. Your duty is to the species. That is the subtext of every childhood birthday party: you’re one step nearer to doing your bit.
It’s a long slow climb to adulthood, and few of us believe we ever truly get there.
Nevertheless something odd happens to time once we’re deemed to have grown up. Birthdays become like sets of traffic lights, each closer than the last set and each unfailingly on green, beckoning us on.
From a standing start, time becomes like one of those winter Olympic sliding sports — the skeleton would be the most apt — where the contestant simply gathers speed, banging from side to side on the track, shuddering, white-knuckled and trying only to hang on.
Eventually you reach the point when you’re still cleaning up after one birthday party while someone is blowing up balloons for the next.
Except, of course, you don’t have birthday parties any more. For there’s nothing to celebrate. Every extra birthday now serves only to confirm that you are just another of time’s little vassals.
A birthday is no longer a marker of gain — of strength, of maturity, of privilege, of independence — but of loss: of hair, of ambition, of sperm count, of high-pitch hearing, of low-pitch hearing, of long sight, of short sight, of memory of names, and, above all, of one’s allotment of years.
But now a bunch of us, old friends, all superannuated, all knowing we’re nothing special, are back to having birthday parties, or at least, if not parties, marking birthdays by getting together, by hosting a dinner, or taking a big table at the pub and arguing and telling tales and laughing as you should in pubs.
One of our number has survived cancer. Today’s birthday girl is having chemotherapy for something I don’t ask the details of.
No doubt some of us are down to single figures in birthdays remaining, but the trick, of course, is in the not knowing.
I doubt that any of us are much afraid of dying. But I bet we’re all afraid of senility, of incapacity, of dependence, of not being able to go the pub and laugh the birthday away.
So that’s why I’m whacking the keys.
Forgive me my haste. I have a hugely unimportant date to keep. And I will.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
