It's my birthday today. One of the things I always look forward to is my annual greeting from the people at Yo! Sushi! who somehow never forget to email me every year.
"It's your birthday!"
They cry at the top of the message. Thanks Yo! Sushi! Not only great memory from the sushi people, but also the prescience to assume that I've forgotten what day it is.
I'm not complaining too loudly. After all, they've given me a third off my next visit, which, if statistics continue at the current rate will be the year 2023. As long as inflation doesn't push the price of sushi up by a third, I'll be tucking into discounted nigiri and sashimi long into my mid-forties.
Forties. The word looms now, less than a year away. It doesn't feel right somehow; I remember when my Mum turned 40 - she got a load of cards about how 'life begins at forty' and I (aged about eight I suppose) piped up precociously and said that someone had made up the phrase so that they could feel better about being old.
That does not seem that long ago really.
There's snow dribbling out of the grey sky. It's not settling, just slowly and silently falling onto the cold, damp concrete and roof tiles, where it disappears imperceptibly. I don't believe it's ever snowed on my birthday. It's quite nice to sit here and watch it flurry across the street.
Yesterday, I took my yearly trip into London. It snowed there too. I was going to go to the Natural History Museum this time, particularly to see the Wildlife Photography of the Year exhibit, but when I got out of the subway, I realised that the front entrance was closed and only the side was open.
A long queue of shivering tourists stretched back along Exhibition Road, shuffling slowly towards the tiny single-door-entrance. I didn't feel like standing there with them so I ducked across the road and swooshed into the Victoria & Albert Museum instead.
"Just need to search your bag sir," said a man in a yellow jacket. I unzipped it.
"Only junk in there, really," I said.
"Same with everyone, sir," he said, cheerily. I chuckled.
"Any exhibitions on today?" I asked.
"Yes there's a really good one," he said, looking at me, "A Brief History of Underwear."
I made an embarrassed kind of face, swung my security-checked rucksack over my shoulder, said something like "Ah," and then made my way into the sculpture hall.
I don't think I care enough about the history of underwear to go round a special exhibit on the subject. I'm sure the Victorians and the Elizabethans and the Edwardians had all kinds of ways to... and... with their... well, I didn't think it was for me.
As ever, the museum was full of beautiful art, fashion, design and invention. I reminded myself of the scale of the Crystal Palace and the grandeur of Victorian triumphalism. I stood open mouthed in front of the Raphael Cartoons and tapestries, I wandered through corridors of shiny glass cabinets and looked deep into the marble faces of the ancient ones, who occupy that world where they're both long forgotten and yet still here with us, as lifelike as ever.
I stood motionless as tiny herds of schoolchildren breezed past, led by pretty teachers and weary teaching assistants. Some of the little ones were wearing wigs and top hats and clutched pencils and sketch pads. I should have taken a sketch pad.
I always think museums are wonderful places to sketch the past. But it's a past of artefacts and ornaments. The quiet reverence of a museum hall seems like the strangest place to see a Tudor fireplace, around which noblemen would have laughed and roasted and drunk. The once normal things of life, the bashed-into, the crackable, ordinary objects of life are now revered behind velvet rope and must not be touched. I think that's quite a sad side-effect of the passage of time.
Much like being eight years old one minute and never comprehending that you'll ever be as old as your Mum, and then waking up one snowy morning on your thirty-ninth birthday, wondering how on earth that happened.
But this is not a time to be prosaic or melancholy. No no! This is a time to celebrate! After all, it's a special occasion! I should go out for a nice lunch somewhere, I suppose.
I wonder if Yo! Sushi! is open.
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