HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ME

(This is not a photograph of the author)

Early in the history of my substacking - so not very long ago - I mentioned it was my birthday and requested ‘No presents, please.’ If I confess to surprise at how literally you took those words, don’t construe me as saying I wanted presents. But it might have been nice had someone asked if I meant it.

It will be my birthday again in a few days. ‘No presents, please.’ There is no reason to ask if I mean it. Of course I mean it. When it comes to material possessions I am of the shedding generation now, not the acquisitive. And when it comes to the necessities for happiness - though I was brought up in a superstitious household and warned never to admit to happiness lest the gods of eternal gloom turned jealous and snatched it all away - I confess that what I have far exceeds my expectations and entitlement. But happiness is a minx and can cause havoc in the inside of your head even while rubbing the rest of you down with the rarest salves and unguents. Whatever felicities the day has brought, night falls and now you’re on your own. Ask me what I lack and I will answer nothing; ask me what I’d like less of and I will answer introspection. I know the inside of my head so well that if we were were man and wife I’d be granted divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable familiarity.

It cannot be that I have the same thoughts I had when I was a babe in arms - at three I hadn’t yet been married once let alone three times, and I was still to read Hamlet - but it is as though the interior landscape of thought has not changed. The mind is still a melancholy chamber, ash-grey in colour, voluminous enough to house every discontent and yet without vistas, as though its function is to multiply echoes of a single originating sorrow not house an abundance of them. I was yet to hear a late Beethoven Quartet when I was three, but something very like a late Beethoven Quartet was playing - fiercely competitive as though the instruments would destroy each other if they could. I heard it again last night when I was unable to sleep. Beautiful in its alternating calm and strenuousness - the nearest music has ever got to conversation - but pitiless. I just want to sleep at night now. I’ve argued enough. And most of those I argued with are no longer here. It was probably gripe that was troubling me when I was three, but maybe gripe was just a way of practising. Yes, I know gripe is an intestinal not a mental complaint but it’s not for nothing that we use the verb to denote incessant, petty grumbling. Gripe might start in the gut but in the end it becomes a trouble to the soul.

I was not a happy or what some call a ‘bubbly’ child. I am a lover of Wordsworth but I did not come into the world trailing clouds of glory. I was more a Blakeian baby, ‘helpless, naked, piping loud, like a fiend hid in a cloud.’ Can I be trusted about this? Can it be that I value misery too much - that I take a sort of pride in it - and don’t want to have been a happy child? Yes, that’s possible, though early photographs support my claim. In none of them am I smiling. As I recollect, I saw nothing in babydom I wanted and longed to go straight to adulthood. Well, the laugh is now on me. As I lie in the ash-grey chamber of ancient echoes I search in vain for the youth I skipped. Where is it? One minute I couldn’t wait for life to start, the next I am dreading it will soon end.

Happiness, you minx!

Maybe it is introspection’s job to search for the missing years? Not memories. Memories all too easily find themselves (I am plagued by memories). But to make the past a living presence in the now, not experience looked back on but continuous, an accumulation of years that plays in the mind like a living tableau, a continuum of neither neither past nor future, both of which, for introspectives like me, crowd the night with dread.

Let me put this another way. As I lie here in the dark, tense and wistful, afraid of what’s to come, sorrowing and guilty over what’s been and gone, it’s as though I am one of those figures from a children’s crayoning and puzzle book, waiting for the dots that will make me whole to be joined up. . . The greatest challenge, to get the smile right.

That’s not a hint that I would like you to buy me such a book. I have no more room for books. My library is a precariously balanced pile. One more and the lot will topple.

So, I repeat, ‘No presents.’ Though you could, of course, become a subscriber. That way we all get something.