My birthday is coming up again and it’s got my reminiscing about my 40th, nearly 3 years ago. I know I’m lucky to have seen my 40th, many people don’t etc, but just wondered if anyone could top this for a crap big birthday.
First of all, I’d planned when I was 38 that I would spend my 40th in Thailand with friends and no kids, I’d got my mum to agree to have my kids for 3 weeks way in advance. So that’s what I SHOULD have been doing, here’s what actually happened.
For a start, it was lockdown (2 maybe?). And at that point socialising was banned, I think if you were a single person you were allowed one person in your bubble. So everything was closed and no one was going anywhere at all. My bf, who at that point I’d only been with for 6 months, was working away in another country for a couple of months so he wasn’t around at all.
The week of my birthday I had people from the housing association replacing the wall ties in my house, which involved them using a massive drill and waking me up before 8am each morning (it was half term), by drilling into my bedroom wall from the scaffolding outside. It really did make the most god awful noise. I decided that as my birthday was already going to be crap enough, I wasn’t going to wake up to that on my 40th, so I checked myself into the local travelodge the night before.
So I spent my 40th eve drinking two cans of cider in solitude in a travelodge, thinking well it’s not quite Thailand is it. Then in the morning woke up with terrible back pain from the uncomfortable bed. Then my mum came to meet me at the travelodge to take me out for the only birthday breakfast she could…a spin around the Maccas drive thru in her car (technically meeting my mum was against the covid rules but hell you’re only 40 once). Once breakfast was done I returned home to find that the fucking workmen hadn’t turned up, so the whole travelodge thing was for nothing.
Started to feel a bit queer not long after I got home, which quickly evolved into full blown food poisoning, from the McDonald’s breakfast is the only explanation, so I spent the afternoon puking, and shitting through the eye of a needle.
Thankfully after a few hours of that it seemed to be out of my system, so I got changed and headed to my birthday ‘party’, which consisted of two of my friends and going over to one of their houses. Now again, this was one more person that we were technically allowed, but as far as we were going to push things in the days of curtain twitching neighbours and people grassing people up. The friend whose house it was is a very good friend, the other was a more recent one. The more recent one turned up
steaming drunk and was just nasty all night, culminating in standing over me and screaming in my face because ‘my life was perfect’ - it’s almost laughably far from perfect - before storming out of the house and flouncing away. So then it was just me and my other friend, who I love dearly but it wasn’t much of a 40th bash really.
Of course everyone was like ‘you’ll have to make up for it when lockdown is over’, but in reality that was never going to happen, no one gave a shit that it had been my birthday many months before and were busy doing things they hadn’t been able to do previously.
Can anyone top that for a shit 40th? My 30th was even worse, believe it or not, and I really planned to make up for that when I turned 40, but it clearly wasn’t to be.