Today is my birthday, but not a significant one.
I had a big ceilidh for my 50th birthday but hadn’t intended celebrating my 60th.
The week before Fester’s 60th his brother dropped dead; so his birthday started with a phone call from the pathologist with the cause of death (heart disease), followed by lots of other unpleasant ones to undertakers, solicitors etc.
I’m not sure whether it was superstition or solidarity but I really didn’t want to make a fuss.
Our traditional birthday tea with my boys was really all I wanted.
Bigsister, however, thought otherwise.
My fault I suppose for using hers as an excuse to spend a weekend with my friend Paula in Kew, leaving a surprise bunch of 60 pink carnations on her doorstep on the way past. The flower seller outside her tube station never forgot it.
A couple of weeks before my own 60th she phoned me with “Well Middlesister and I and the husbands are coming up so if you don’t organise something we will.”
Fortunately our oldest cousin’s birthday is the day after mine: I am the baby of our generation, which spans 22 years. She lives just a few miles away so I phoned her and suggested we have a joint birthday tea in the Grand Hotel on her birthday, satisfying family and treating a few close friends.
The sisters and spouses arrived on my birthday bearing gifts, including something very special which I wrote about on Facebook.
When I was 20months old we moved into the family home in Carmarthenshire. Grampa was in his late 70s and I spent almost every morning with him until I went to school when I was almost 5 and he almost 81. He died in the November.
To suddenly have him so close today was such a moving delight.
If you are good at deciphering you may be able to read the copperplate he learnt to write in the 1880s (I've left all the gossip in because I suspect most of those involved are long gone).
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