Birthday Flavour Festivities! (Blog 453)

I am now 36 as is Jack Whitehall! Roman numerals are considered inferior to Arabic numbers, but I can say my age with both of my hand’s fingers using the former system, which would be X X X V I. I simply cross six of my fingers and make a V sign and a I sign with my remaining fingers and thumb. Pretty cool. Can I signal 36 with the other system? If so, I can’t work out how. Another positive story is the one where I think I recently saw an eagle in my garden. Anyway, what happened on my special day? I’ll explain. To start things off, I went supermarket and garden centre shopping with my dad. Pretty unspectacular, although I did buy some special jelly babies in the shape of meerkats, and I wore my new Van Halen jumper with pride. Since the age of 13, I’ve always wanted to tell the world I liked Van Halen, but could never find the clothes to do so. Well not anymore! Soon after getting home, I jogged to the local train station as I didn’t have time to go to the gym. I must really like jogging, right? Yep, that’s the explanation. Pretty simple really.

When in Kingston, I found that my train arrived one minute late. Not a huge deal, but the train home would be leaving 5 minutes earlier than I thought it would. I’d better hurry with my shopping, otherwise I’d have to wait a whole hour for the next train home. They’re the perils of using trains on a Sunday, usually they leave every half an hour. I jogged to the CD shop nice and quickly. Phew! Nope, no phew, as the shop was holding a special music artist signing event. I was therefore told to wait another 15 minutes! :S No can do, I HAD to find a way of buying music ASAP. I had an idea, I could join the queue inside the shop and simply act like I was there for the signing. Luckily the queue was where the CDs were, so I could actually browse and pick things up quite happily. In hindsight, I suppose I should have signed the pieces of paper I had with me for making notes, but I had no idea who the signer was, so I’m assuming few people have heard of her. So screw it. I could have had my CDs signed, but that would be weird as the chances the artist had anything to do with my music are very small.

Because of my fraudulent but effective queue use and my running back to the station, I actually had a fair amount of waiting around to do in the place. I noticed someone had graffitied the same thing over and over again, much like the person who paints eggs all over Central London. I call him the Dominant Egg. Also in the station, I was entertained by someone who looked just like me, but a younger version. The other commuters seemed to have noticed the similarities! The train home was mostly without incident, though it did start to rain heavily in the last few minutes. Oh no, my jumper, it would be soaked! How would I show it to my brother and my sister in law later on in the restaurant that was booked? I’d have to put the thing in the washing machine!… Or so it would seem… I simply put it in the tumble dryer and things were looking good. I then did some more exercising, getting ready for the hearty meal!

Soon enough, I left with my dad to meet my other two family members in a Turkish restaurant. For starters I had pizza. Not very Turkish is it? Or maybe it is. It has recently been proven in my last blog I don’t know too much about other countries and geography in general, but what I do know is Turkish delight comes from Turkey (it HAS to) and the pizza was indeed delightful. The foodery may or may not have got foods mixed up, but they mastered the English language at least in a way. Well they mastered a word anyway. (Delight).  For my main course I had a hell of a lot of steak, that I ordered medium rare. It might just be in my head, but I swear my other family members were looking at me a little funny during the ordering. Were they assuming I like the taste of raw meat? Maybe, maybe not. Over time, I also ordered two cocktails and had my trademark ‘does it have caffeine’ question. They didn’t, I was fine.

The various conversations everyone had were fairly normal I think. My dad discussed the new thing in his garden he had built for him, but when I asked what it was, he went weird around me and didn’t answer the question. I have no idea either, it’s just a raised circle area with plants on it. I obviously always talk about Staines and food, and interestingly my brother and his wife talked about the exact same things, they talked of other foods even though everyone was eating at the time! The only real difference was he keeps talking about holidaying in Turkey, as well. That really is it. The music playing in the background was just as satisfying as the repetitive though comforting conversations, the highlights were cover versions of R.E.M. AND Sting!

I kind of regretted telling the staff it was my birthday after they asked why everyone was celebrating, as they soon played birthday music just for me. It was pretty annoying. I did however get a birthday card that I’ll treasure and eventually throw away. Everyone was given tea on the house. For flip’s sake, I said my catchphrase TWICE, how many more times do you need? There is no way in hell I’m drinking tea, it’s not going to happen!! As no one liked the alcoholic lemon shots that were also on the house, I had everyone’s. When leaving the place, I consequently had difficulty walking, but on the plus side I was thinking that I didn’t really miss alcohol that much, after giving it up, last Christmas. It would ironically be a sobering thought if I did miss it. Isn’t that strange? Anyway, on the whole a fab birthday! Bye!