Happy Birthday.

 Happy Birthday

Ah yes. It's another birthday to yours truly. With the passing of time and the whole ageing process, you begin to find gratitude for good mental and physical health much easier to accept. There is no longer the desire for birthday cards, validation or approval, that constant craving for presents or planning elaborate parties where friends and family come flocking from all the points of the geographical compass. 

You settle for what you have, recognising humbly that another year has been flown by and you are no longer the child of nature you used to be or the awkward teenage adolescent for whom birthdays probably meant something important on the day but never more than some inevitable occurrence. So you privately smiled and congratulated and just got on with the business of the day, deeply proud of your achievements thus far but no longer the kid who insisted on jelly and ice cream, Pass the Parcel or Musical Chairs games and parties with your friends and family. 

The transition of childhood into fully fledged adult life with partners, boys to men and girls to women,  is almost old as time itself. Childhood is all about the development of bones, muscles, brain capacity, mobility and cultural moments in your early lives. There is also the wondrous realisation of religion, discovering much more about being Jewish, understanding the finer nuances of life, those cherished hours, months, weeks and years where we simply want to stop, take stock and become reflective and enormously appreciative. 

The cliche of course that, when we were kids, life was the most exciting journey that would last forever and that remains very much the case today. An aura of immortality, untouchable impregnability and a real sense of indestructibility and invincibility always floods all over us because, as children, the world is, quite literally, our oyster. You can be the greatest mathematician and engineer, the most remarkable inventor and scientist who ever lived. There is so much time, potential, so many encouraging omens, a time to grasp the nettle. So you wake up on your birthday morning and open up the cards from family and friends and just feel good about yourself. 

This is your 63rd birthday and you feel as you should do no younger and no older than you thought you might. There are no more twinges, aches and pains than would ordinarily be the case. You are now the grandfather of two stunning grandchildren and this feels so satisfying. If anybody had told you over 32 years ago that you would have a wonderfully loving and supportive wife and two gorgeous children, then you would probably have thought they were mad. But here you are 63 years later and the panorama is still stunning. 

Of course the bones are not nearly as flexible as they were when you were 15 or 20 because back then you were at the height of your athleticism, running for miles, oozing with boundless stamina if perhaps at the time, painfully shy, lonely, remote, detached and totally confused. But as they often tell us, age is in the mind, a psychological obstacle, a state of mind perhaps and of course they're right. But although the body may be willing, the mind would much rather do nothing on your birthday. 

So there you are on the anniversary of your birth. Do you loosen and fling away all of your inhibitions with a luxurious bath, book into the swankiest five star hotel on Park Lane in London's West End or perhaps glide down the River Thames with family and friends while consuming the most delicious afternoon tea and being surrounded with unconditional love? Or perhaps you could re-capture your childhood spirit with a visit to a kids fairground or just jump onto a park swing and spend all the day there. 

Personally memories of childhood birthdays are far too vague and indistinct for any clear recollection. Your mum once told you that you were invited to the second birthday party of the lad who used to live around the corner to us. The two year old son David had a father who was both a superb upholsterer by trade and a magician in his spare time. He was also a football referee because Uncle Roy, as you called him, was the best and most qualified. Their family had a mum Janet who was always amiable and welcoming. But then it suddenly occurred to you that you were lavished with birthday presents as a child. It all returns to the surface of  your mind and fills you with delight. At the time it was so sufficiently thrilling an experience, that you can hardly believe that it happened. 

It could have been any childhood year, be it fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth, maybe ninth because, at some point, it all becomes blurred by time. But you can still remember sprawling all over your mum and dad's carpet and dad just being there for you, his adoring first son. It was a Hornby railway train set and the images are unforgettable. Lovely dad began the whole wonderful task by grabbing hold of a set of rails and then carefully fixing every rail together and then attaching the carriages and brown wagons to each other. It all seems the most glorious of all days but it is now just a distant misty period of our lives but how wonderful it felt and still does all those years later.

And then as the years progressed, birthdays became less important, occasions of noteworthy interest. Mum was always there for a card, a complex but beautiful Lego plastic brick set that you spent hours simply clipping together, assembling something, then dismantling it as if it were some dream home that you'd just built. Birthdays were then just briefly acknowledged, perhaps celebrated in a small way but never made a real fuss of. There was something called an Etch a Sketch, a drawing machine that a Smart Phone, Tablet would have been today's equivalent or something that used to be called Photo shopping now but the Etch a Sketch was a major source of fascination. 

It was 50 years ago today - or a week before your birthday- that you were called up to sing and chant your Torah piece for your barmitzvah. The occasion still has an air of clarity to it. It was a synagogue hall in Gants Hill, Essex and was then known as the Beehive Lane shul. Dressed in the fashionable ruffed purple shirt and bow tie of the time with the cleanest white shirt, tie or, quite possibly, bow tie, flared trousers that were synonymous with the 1970s and platform shoes as high as Paddington railway station. 

But here is where it gets very amusing. On the occasion of your rites of passage adolescence, your barmitzvah, you were piled high with fountain pens, and the brand new calculators which had just become very marketable and cut out all the scribbling of maths equations, sums and percentages. Calculators were supposed to be the future and, to this day, are still widely available. They had small keyboard numbers with a flashing green light on the calculator  and the tiniest of numbers on the smallest of screens. 

Oh yes and before you forget there were all the hundreds of cheques and cheque books, cheques with goodness knows how much money they had given you. But you didn't care because you were remarkably wealthy at the tender age of 13 and besides, you'd always wanted to open up an ISA account as a teenager or just take out shares in a spectacularly affluent oil company. So it is we now arrive at the piece de resistance, the much coveted present of all presents, the kind of gift that sent you into a trance of bewilderment. 

Finally, there was the ultimate in all birthday or barmitzvahs gifts. For some inexplicable reason, your guests on the day felt it the most opportune moment to give you clothes valets just in case your wardrobe was in dire need for what looked more like glorified clothes hangers. At the time you were perhaps grateful and appreciative but it all felt unwanted and superfluous to any requirement. You can remember feeling quite underwhelmed with clothes valets and faintly insulted since you were never a follower of any fashion at the time. But hey it was good to be 13 and besides, by the age of 14, you'd have been pleasantly surprised by another novelty birthday present.

Still, here you are on your 63rd birthday and not really caring for such fripperies as balloons, whistles, cakes, birthday cakes with lashings of chocolate cream, the party clown or magician and last but not least, the jelly and ice cream. We look back to our childhood birthdays and imagine them in some rose tinted isolation, some golden halo of time when, back in the 1960s, you could leave your door open, leave your kids on their bikes during the school summer holiday and just enjoy the fruits of the day itself. 

Today is your birthday, my birthday, the anniversary of my birth, the day my lovely mum and dad gingerly descended the steps of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and thought their life was complete. And indeed it was. It was 1962 and a boy band from Liverpool were about to create history and become a pop music sensation, a phenomenon, a universal revelation that took the whole world by storm. They were called the Beatles and for the rest of the decade they would become the greatest musicians, lyricists, record breakers of all time. They would release a multitude of singles, number ones that rolled off endless conveyor belts, best selling albums, gold and platinum records by the lorry load and then push back every conceivable boundary.  

Now of course there was quite finally the one BBC programme that had most kids of that age cowering fearfully behind their sofas and settees. On the day of my first birthday Dr Who began what would turn into a national treasure, a science fiction TV series that blew everybody away quite literally. It was, perhaps, not as revolutionary as some might have thought at the time because, during the 1950s a BBC classic called Quatermass had frightened the lives out of us. 

But today 62 years ago today, one William Hartnell became established as the first of the Doctors, a strangely dressed, professorial type who was transported through hundreds of time journeys. In a police box that had now been converted into something called a Tardis, Dr Who showed considerable foresight because you suspected he must have known a baby in his cot was vaguely aware that something astonishing and appropriate was about to happen on our black and white TV set.

 And still Dr Who has survived the ages to the present day. It was scary science fiction that may have inadvertently traumatised, albeit briefly, the children who just happened to be watching. But then it was safe to come out from behind the chairs and tables. So it's a very humble, unfussy and modest birthday to yourself. It's time to indulge in just a hint or maybe an abundance of chocolate. Go on treat yourself. You deserve it.