Happy Birthday To You

It's my Beloved's birthday this week. I've planned a few little celebration treats for her that she doesn't know about yet. You won't tell her, right? It's not a 'big' birthday, either in milestone terms (i.e. she's not twenty, thirty, forty or any other round number) or in the number of years (she's only twenty-one... again), but it got me thinking.

Do people in other countries celebrate birthdays? And have we always done so here? Well the answers to both of these was pretty much a resounding yes in both cases. Bob Geldof once famously asked of people half a world away, Do they know it's Christmas? No, but do they know that it's their birthday? Absolutely! As long as we've had calendars we've celebrated the anniversary of our birth day. Even in places where the calendar differs from our Gregorian one they congratulate the birthday boy or girl, add a year to their age and hold some kind of party or feast. It's a 'gathering of the clans' thing, a bonding of family and friends. An excuse for bringing loved ones together and strengthening the ties between them. It's a time for letting people know that we care about them even if we only send a card.

Is age important? After all, it's just a number isn't it? Or do people only start saying that when they get to 'a certain age' (whatever that may be)? Well the number of years that we've been alive can indicate what kind of celebration we hold; there are hundreds of different coming of age rituals around the world, and many different ages at which to recognise them. Fortunately my Beloved is beyond most of them now but I could still help her celebrate her 'normal' birthday in the way they do in other cultures.

I could grease her nose with butter as some Canadians do or try the Argentinian tradition of giving her earlobe one tug for every year she's been alive. The Nepalese daub the face of the celebrant with yoghurt that's been coloured with paint or dye. I'm not sure I'd get away with that one. I don't think that I could do the Israeli thing of lifting the chair that she's sitting in high in the air for as many times as the years she's had either. And she's certainly not getting any red envelopes stuffed with cash as they do in China and Vietnam. I think I'd better just settle for baking her a cake.

The actually date of our birth is a much more official matter though. In most countries knowing precisely what day you were born on is a national social requirement, a part of an individual's unique personal identification. You have to know your accurate date of birth pretty much everywhere these days although that wasn't always the case. You only have to trace a British family tree back more than a few generations to see that the date of a baby's Christening or registration of birth was often logged in the official records just as regularly as that of the birth itself. But curiously enough people have always celebrated birthdays even if they weren't too sure of the precise date. In a few countries it's still quite common for people (as it is for racehorses the world over) to have their official date of birth noted as the first day of the year, despite any evidence to the contrary. That's far too close to Christmas. You have to space your celebrations out a little.

And she'll be celebrating this week. Happy birthday, love.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

My Friend Elizabeth

My friend Elizabeth never says a word
Her mum says kids should be seen, not heard
I think she's not too happy at home
And she spends a lot of her days alone
At her house so now she passes her time
Quietly playing with me at mine

So my friend Elizabeth doesn't say much
But she's always there with a calming touch
And a friendly smile and a hand on my shoulder
She'll always be there as we both get older
Because night or day I can always depend
On Elizabeth, my most reliable friend

We never, ever argue and never, ever row
She always knows what I need, somehow
Like a little hug or a shoulder to cry on
She's the friend I can always rely on
I can tell her things that I keep well hidden
She never, ever judges and nothing is forbidden

She smiles and nods and she holds my hand
As I tell her of all the dreams I've planned
For when we grow up and have kids of our own
We'll have such fun when we're fully grown
Away from names and tears and fists
And all those things that won't be missed

When we're on our own I don't have to pretend
I'll never upset her or offend
I'm grateful for the time we spend
Together our broken lives can mend
Me and Elizabeth, friends to the end
Everyone should have an invisible friend

If You Can't Stand the Heat

Television chefs astound me. They rush around in their perfectly organised TV studio kitchen preparing gourmet meals in under thirty minutes (while leaving the rubbish and the pots for someone else to sort out) and then say “What could be simpler than that?”.

Well Jamie, have you never heard of a microwave?  Remove seal… wait for the ping… chow down. Simple! It may not be as delicious as the tiny thing that you created but it’s certainly much, much simpler and much more filling. And so is that staple of student cuisine, the Pot Noodle.

These cookery shows provide great entertainment but for many people they have as much to do with the food that they actually eat as Top Gear has to most people’s cars. In real life most of us treat food as just fuel. I guess that’s why we have such an obesity problem. Open mouth – stuff fuel in – burn fuel off somehow – repeat. Food is not there for taste it's just to make us feel full, so we can't be bothered about taking the time to make it wholesome, nutritious and delicious. Even more importantly in these busy days, cooking is a time-thief. We can't afford to spend half the day preparing your half-hour dinner because if we did we'd miss our favourite cooking programme.

So why should we be bothered to actually ‘cook’ meals as opposed to simply reheating things? Why on earth would anybody want to spend three, four or more hours chopping, stirring, baking, rolling, blitzing (I could go on) food which will, in all probability, be wolfed down in less than ten minutes? And don’t forget the washing up. Sometimes that alone can take longer than the eating time.

I appreciate that it can be a bonding thing between the one who cooks and the ones who eat but that’s not always immediately obvious. A single mum who puts food in front of three teenage boys is unlikely to experience much in the way of gratitude. She'll count herself lucky if they even eat it in the same room as her.

My Beloved, however, certainly does appreciate it when I make the effort to cook something. She says that she loves the food itself and the fact that she’s not had to cook it. That's really nice of her. It's always good to be appreciated.

But I don’t do it for her. I don't do it for the cookery element at all. I do it to relax. It might not seem it when I'm running around opening the cooker far too often to check on the contents while stirring with one hand and rummaging at the back of the fridge for some obscure ingredient with the other, all the while checking the tick-tick-tick of the clock as it slowly creeps to the precise second when my food should be done, but I find cooking relaxing. The following of precise and predictable recipies makes me concentrate on one thing, just one thing, at once - my brain doesn't have time to do its usual hyperspeed hunt-and-peck at things that I didn't know I was supposed to be worrying about. It just has to stop and focus totally on the unfamiliar act of folding or basting or whatever it is that's number thirty-six in the method on the recipe sheet. I cook to stop me thinking about other stuff, and if I produce something tasty (or at least something that doesn't give us both a case of runny-tummy) at the end of it then that's a bonus.

But, just like those television chefs, if I’ve cooked it then someone else can do the washing up.

Music Was My First Love

In what year was the best ever music made produced? You know what I mean, the perfect singles that you loved way back when. The ones that have stayed with you all your life and even now bring a smile to your face.

It’s a daft question I know, one that can never be answered categorically, but I suspect that most people’s year of choice would be sometime around when they were between the ages of 12 and sixteen. Those are the years that you’re generally most receptive to the importance of music in your life.

I know that I was. The music of my youth was magnificent and still stands the test of time. I could never understand why kids of today don’t recognise the brilliance of the stuff that was produced back then. Real songs with meaningful lyrics played by angry young men on real instruments. Old fogey I may be, but at least I’m right. How can anybody listen to all that dance rubbish? It’s all bum-tish, bum-tish, bum-tish and something that sounds like a car alarm going off. No wonder they all take drugs at raves, I should imagine it would be the only way to listen to that garbage.

I was ranting at the radio as usual because Radio Two had dared to play something modern – from about 1999, it was – and I was just getting into my stride when it struck me. As I write this we’re in the year 2013. How on earth did that happen? The music that I’m thinking of mostly harks back to around 1977. That’s 36 years ago. Thirty-six! Tempus doesn’t half fugit if you don’t keep track of it. Many people who were listening to the same stuff as me back then are grandparents now. But what a year for music it was. The classic first albums by Elvis Costello, the Boomtown Rats, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, Television, the Stranglers…  I could go on.

So why don’t people born in 1990 or there abouts listen to these classic songs? Well I guess it’s mostly that the kids who are listening to music today have as much in common with the Clash and Costello as I did with the top artists of 1941 – 36 years before 1977. That would be Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Vera Lynne or Bing Crosby. What a horrifying realisation. These are all artists that I’ve come to appreciate if not necessarily like as I’ve got older but would I have willingly listened to them as a teenager?  I think not.

The musical choices of our youth gives us an identity. They’re something that we, as children beginning to enter an adult world, can own at a time in our lives when the most important things around us belong to our parents. More often than not, we want our selections to be distinctly different from theirs. It’s a teenage rebellion and if listening to music that sounds (to them) awful is as bad as it gets then I guess the parents should be thankful.

Each generation should listen to their own music, especially if their elders turn their noses up at it. That’s right and proper.

Just cut it out with the bum-tish, bum-tish, OK?

© Shaun Finnie 2013