Birthday Girl

Happy birthday to me! Today I am – erm – twenty-three years old. Not.

Charles is officially the best boyfriend ever! He sent me a huge bouquet of lilies and a box of Bouja Bouja chocolates at work. After years of collecting flowers from Reception for other people it was finally my turn, and it did feel nice! Someone who saw the flowers said, “Wow, a man who sends you flowers! And in public too!” which made me giggle.

One of the girls in my group came up to me with a birthday card. Not for me, unfortunately, but to sign for somebody else whose birthday is tomorrow. Tact obviously isn’t her strong point – she saw my birthday cake on my desk and said, “Ooh we can use that for Katherine’s birthday cake, we can pretend we bought it for her!” Erm, no, I don’t think so, that’s MY birthday cake thanks! She could hardly have missed the fact that it was my birthday with the cards all over my desk and Charles’ lovely flowers (which I made a point of getting her to smell – sniff those, look it’s my birthday!) yet it didn’t occur to her to quickly run off and get everyone else to sign another card for me. Hmph! I felt like scrawling a grumpy It's my birthday too, you know! all across Katherine’s card, but thought I’d better not.

This evening Charles – becoming more and more like ‘Super Boyfriend’ by the minute – gave up his tango class to cook me dinner. That might not sound so amazing but Charles never gives up his evening classes for anything – not snow, not earthquake, not even if he’s so ill he can barely crawl. Even when he’s 92 he’s still going to be tottering down to his tango and Spanish classes four times a week, knocking people over with his walking stick if they try to get in his way. He did spoil the ‘romantic dinner’ effect slightly by saying that I had precisely two hours to eat because then he was going off into London for the evening… but he did rethink a little later and said I could stay a bit longer if I wanted to as it was my birthday. Gosh thanks! (Hopefully he’ll eventually get it that an evening together means a whole evening and not a tightly timetabled small slot in between going to London and watching Newsnight… but baby steps, baby steps!) Anyway, the dinner itself was gorgeous – cod cooked in cumin and garlic, with spiced potatoes. Mmm mm, dee-licious! Thank you Charlie-boy, much appreciated!