Hello! savour members can now listen to the audio narration of these letters, simply scroll down beneath the paywall.
If you’re canny, you can sense it as the lights dim: that bubble of anticipation and excitement that arrives with the teetering glow of candlelight moving through the air at chest-height. The cake! The slow, tremulous rise of “Haaaa” before the rest of the room twigs and joins in with the song. Introvert, extrovert, it doesn’t matter: for these few, slightly excruciating moments, you are the birthday hostage, and you must accept these gifts.
I love the birthday cake moment; I feel very fortunate to have had so many of them, but I also love participating in others’. The novelty supermarket cake awkwardly shuffled out of its box at 4pm on a weekday among colleagues, when everyone is needing a sugar hit but nobody wants to navigate Colin the Caterpillar’s face with a balsa-wood knife. The bombastic, expensive, patisserie cakes presented at Big Parties, which always end up in a puddle of cream. The homemade ones, which arrive with all that love and time and icing sugar dust, on plates you’d normally eat your dinner on. Even in restaurants, when the person is a complete stranger and the servers bring out a little ball of ice cream with a dripping candle, I love joining in on the song. A little bit of silliness in an otherwise ordinary Tuesday night.