A Happy Birthday

Turning 48 at Easter. French Zebras. The Back Room. KT Tunstall. Sushi and Sake. Minimal Viable Parenting. Midlife Mellows.

I turned 48 yesterday. Forty-eight. When put that way, it sounds Biblical. I am not quite feeding the five thousand, nor am I one of the twelve disciples, but I am now implicated in the declaration that forty people shared a meal.¹

It was one of my happiest birthdays, full of low expectations exceeded with mellow surprises. And not trying too hard. There was no birthday cake, for instance. No candles. And although I have been playing peek-a-boo with a midlife crisis in recent weeks, there were no wishes to be anyone else or anywhere else.

Although it was Good Friday, the part of me that is proto-Christian is relatively quiet these days. I didn’t think about easter beyond telling my sons in passing that the idea of the resurrection is darkly fascinating and all about the centrality of sacrifice to human existence. They responded by reminding me to buy them easter eggs in time for Sunday.

Last year, I wrote here about the intricacy of the easter story. The best way to understand my birthday on Good Friday is that it felt more like Easter Saturday:

In the Christian tradition, the time between Good Friday when Christ was crucified and his resurrection on Easter Sunday is a moment of repose between despair and hope. That struggle with despair and hope defines the human condition, and Easter Saturday can therefore be seen as a microcosm of our whole lives. Perhaps the reason we don’t hear much about Easter Saturday is that we live it every day.

There was only one actual birthday card from my aunt Hazel in Aberdeen, now in her eighties. It featured a Zebra, connecting to a book I wrote 20 years ago called Chess for Zebras. She asked inside if I still liked Zebras. This tickled me and allowed me to share that the French edition of this book will come out this year with a funky cover:

There was only one present, a bottle of Talisker whisky, sent down from Scotland by my mum, but I’ll enjoy it all the more for the lateral connection with Iain McGilchrist (who lives in Talisker, Skye) and for being a birthday gift.

Unusually for my dad, he forgot to send me anything. Normally, his card arrives about a week early. I called as if to say “What’s going on?” and he said he just forgot, which was a novel experience that made me appreciate all the other years.

My wife Siva is on a work trip to the US, and I was glad not to put her under any extra pressure. She called, and even arranged a place for me as her emissary and birthday-deprived husband at another birthday party on Sunday, which I’m looking forward to. She forgot to tell our boys, though, so they didn’t strain to make cards or give me breakfast in bed.

And what a relief.

Nor was there any social media clamour, just a handful of WhatsApp messages from family, friends and colleagues. The holding pattern of love and attention felt both solid and mercifully light.

Mostly, I enjoyed my own domestic time. I went into “minimal viable parenting” mode, also known as ignoring the kids. I got them pastries for breakfast as an afterthought when I treated myself, and I invoked my birthday rights to eat a whole almond croissant, including the custard filling.

A few hours later, I made (also known as placing in the oven) fish and chips for lunch, and boiled some frozen peas as a nod to the gods of nutrition. The boys also seemed happy to be mostly left alone.

I had managed to do some writing for the first two hours of the day, on the final part of my inquiry into the threeness of the world, but mostly I hung out in our “back room”. The house we bought was a wreck, and we ran out of time, money and energy before we moved in, so this part of our house is unrenovated, full of excess kitchen units, without a proper floor and ceiling, concealed cement on the walls, no working lighting above, just one electric point, and no heating.

But I love it. It’s the closest thing I have to a man cave. I’ve been trying to nurse that room into viability with an inflated sense of spatial intelligence and gonzo DIY since we got here three years ago. Yesterday was the first time I felt I might be winning. I’ve removed just enough junk and extraneous furniture to make it a functional place. It’s an aspiring utility room, a remember you’re a chess player room, a DVD nostalgia room, an escape from family refuge, and a general storage room. Whether it’s a freezer, a chair, a tin, a box, or a piano, “Put it in the back room” is almost a family catch phrase.

What I didn’t see coming is that I spent much of the day listening to KT Tunstall. The YouTube genie took me to one of her songs. I noticed she sounded Scottish, she’s fabulously charismatic in her concerts, and there is an intelligence both to her music and how she talks about it. It was somehow fitting to (re)discover KT on my 48th birthday because I think of her as a twenty-something pop star, but I am actually a year younger than her. I hadn’t given her any thought until yesterday, when she appeared as a kind of mid-life fellow traveller.

I had a great time blasting out the tunes and organising the back room, including its new guest of honour that I am sitting on now - a green armchair. I covered holes in the ceiling with cushions, held in place with double-sided tape. It was a ridiculous act, and they will probably fall down, but there was nobody there to stop me.

And then, about 8 pm, I figured we all needed feeding again, and I invoked the birthday licence to take the boys out for dinner. We went to our local sushi place and ordered the set menu for three to keep it simple, topped up with miso soup. And, yes, the birthday licence was invoked again, for some decent (hot) Sake.

Kailash(15) is studying Japanese, and he could read some of the bottle, which made me proud. And Vishnu(9), who often asks me about the news, noticed I was enjoying an unusual drink not made in the UK and pondered: “Daddy, if Keir Starmer put tariffs on Sake, would you still be able to buy it?”

I got talking to our waitress, who was from Taiwan. We spoke about her Taiwanese passport, the growing fear of Chinese invasion, her taking the Life in the UK exam and the ridiculous questions it contains, and now her having a British passport too. I didn’t ask for her name, but she mentioned that dual nationality is a blessing in times of peace, but tricky in times of war, when either country can argue that you are the other’s responsibility. If forced to confess under torture, I might admit that it didn’t escape my attention that she could be considered relatively easy on the eye, but it was just a friendly encounter with a stranger and mostly about our respective spouses and children. I mention that short chat because in an otherwise introspective day, it was a reminder of the joyous struggle in the lives of other people, and of geopolitical realities beyond the back room.

I ambled home with the boys. I exchanged messages and photos with Siva, who seemed happy we had had a good time and amused to see the back room’s new iteration. Kailash made me a cocktail I didn’t particularly want, but it seemed to matter to him to mark the moment. We were low on suitable ingredients, but he found a cocktail glass and used a bit of curvy orange rind to add some gravitas to what I think was mostly a cocktail syrup mixture. Sadly, it was a bit too sweet and I barely touched it, but it was a gift and touching in its way.

I frequently argue with Kailash, who pushes boundaries and then self-justifies and counterattacks like a courtroom lawyer, but in recent months we’ve been getting on well. He’ll be sixteen in a few days. I remember sixteen - the growing strength, the infinite field of possibility, all of which puts forty-eight in perspective. But there’s no age I would rather be.

Before he went to sleep, he made a point of saying “Happy birthday.”

And I said: “Thank you. It really was.”

1. If that’s a dad joke, I take it as a compliment. I am now such a creature. It occurs to me that for those with the time, money and inclination, organising a meal with forty people who more or less like each other might be the perfect way to celebrate becoming forty-ate, and I would gladly come and give a speech at such an event, or just enjoy the meal.

After a few weeks of trying to outmanoeuvre a mid-life crisis, following ghosts down roads not taken, and despairing at the state of the world, I am feeling relatively good. I may yet have to disassemble, and fluctuating moodscapes are normal, but I wanted to share one particular thing that helped keep me together, mostly for guys of a similar age and stage. Ted Gioia is invariably impressive, and I liked his thoughts on how to be a man without actually being James Bond, particularly this part:

Here’s the one big thing that movies and TV shows will never tell you about masculinity. But you need to learn it.

A man achieves happiness in life by delivering on his responsibilities. You have no idea how important this one thing will be to your mental health, your sense of self-worth, your relationships, and your ability to find meaning and purpose in your life.

I’m talking about your responsibilities to your family, your colleagues, your teammates, your friends, your communities and groups, your country—and even to total strangers. (Yes, you have responsibilities to them, too.)

But above all I’m talking about your responsibility to yourself. And when I say you owe something to yourself, I mean your higher image of who you should be.

Living up to these demands is what makes a man happy. It’s also what makes him manly.

A real man goes out into the world and gets things done in order to fulfill these obligations. And this is where traditional masculine values come in—toughness, perseverance, endurance, vitality, ruggedness, and all the rest.

If you figure this out, everything else will fall into place.

It’s pretty basic at some level, but I have found in recent weeks that it helps to keep asking myself: Is this my responsibility? When I find that I am doing too much parenting or housework or other admin, and I am not able to get to what I want to be doing, and feel my best creative years are dwindling, it feels easier when I can see clearly that the things detaining me are also just as much my responsibility. We have to carry what is ours to carry. Of course, as far as life allows, we should not get so submerged that we lose sight of our higher image, as Gioia puts it. Yet the idea that living well is a matter of fulfilling obligations, not all of which can be of your own making, hits the spot for now.