Susan's Birthday.

 I greeted Susan on the stairs and told her to go back to bed. She was up half an hour earlier than she said she would be, and I was still doing the washing up. She did not go back to bed. Her request for her birthday breakfast had been a glass of champagne and a large slice of rainbow cake, but I was still rinsing the cloche. Presentation is everything - or it would have been if I'd been allowed to present it. The cake was quickly placed under glass, the champagne cork popped and two flutes filled with the fizzy stuff. 

She opened her gifts: I had drawn her a picture of Tim Brooke Taylor for her birthday card - Susan liked Tim Brooke Taylor and was upset when he'd succumbed to Covid last year - so I presented him, hands on hips, hair like a bell, union jack waistcoat pushed belligerently forward. I had also bought her a large ceramic hen, that sits in the kitchen as an egg tidy. The label at its throat revealed the hen's name was "Catherine" - which is a perfectly acceptable name for a hen. I'd bought her a couple of bottles of her favourite wine (a Gamay Noir by Jean Floran), a bottle of Monkey 47 gin and a couple of DVDs, featuring British people with posh accents arsing around in very brown rooms. She received her own bodyweight in unguants and creams, some scented candles and a bird table. She was very pleased by all of them. I fixed some gin and tonics. 

Dinner was a triumph. It didn't look like it was going to be: I fucked up the potatoes dauphinoise and cut the strings bunching the venison joint together, and had to truss it up with parcel string. Susan looked very sad at my sagging meat, but you get used to it. But my god. VENISON. I'm fairly certain I've had venison before but I don't remember it being this delicious. I went into raptures about it - I am always massively impressed by my own cooking-its very off-putting - but it was some of the tenderest, most toothsome meat I've ever eaten. I'm all about the venison now. I'm only eating venison. It's time to restring my bow and arrow and put on the Lincoln Green cagoule. I'm off to Sherwood with the panniers on my bike. We ate it with a potato gratin of my own devising (a mistake that turned out well) and black kale. Pudding was chocolate cheesecake. The wine was a Meerlust Rubicon. Still my favourite wine. 

After dinner we settled down to watch "Charters and Caldicott" an 80's TV series written by Keith Waterhouse, in which the two old duffers from "The Lady Vanishes" try to negotiate the 80s while solving a murder. Practically nothing happens. The plot is labyrinthine as well as gossamer thin. It's merely the pleasure of watching two old fools talking about cricket in a series of solid looking brown rooms. We are old. That is what we like. We like the pace of it, the rhythm of the language, we like to watch the Empire dying written on the faces of the men who would actually miss it. 

It'll be my fiftieth next month. I'm not as self-contained as Susan. I would have liked a party. I would have liked to show off. But, as usual, she showed me another, better way. I'm not looking forward to being HALF A CENTURY OLD but if I can do it with half the dignity and serenity that Susan has shown me, and continues to show me, then somehow during those fifty years I will have grown as a human being. And I mean in nobility - not just over my belt buckle.