From English Breakfast to Birch Leaves: How One Man Finally Got My Birthday Right
Recalling the one and only time I stopped being a control freak and what happened
Today is my birthday. I’m 65.
Most of my friends know that when it comes to my birthday, I don’t sit around waiting to be discovered like a micro‑influencer on TikTok with dreams of hosting their own TV show. I organise the party myself. I book the restaurant, I text the guests, I sometimes even wrap my own presents, when my kids find themselves unable to (they say it’s my fault for never having taught them). I have long since given up on the unlikely event that someone will surprise me in a way that doesn’t make me want to quietly correct them. Presents are usually pre-ordered. My family, who know me far too well, understand that spontaneity is not our love language. If you go rogue with a gift in our little tribe, you do so at your peril.
That’s just how it is with me and my family. Blunt to the point of comedy, occasionally to the point of social inappropriateness, but never dishonest. And nobody takes offence. Ever. Well, rarely.
Last Christmas, in a one-off, temporary lapse of self-knowledge, I decided to switch things up. I would be the thoughtful one. I would be novel. I would actually choose a present based on what I imagined would be welcome. I bought my dad a wallet. (Yes, I hear it. Not exactly revolutionary. But still.) I presented it with what I felt was a modest flourish. He took one look and said, in the tone of Larry David (because, like him, my dad is from New York), “I already have a wallet I really like.”
Before I could even gather my dignity, my youngest son chirped up, “I really could use a wallet.”
My father, without missing a beat, handed it straight over. “There you go.”
And that was that. My gift, rehomed in under thirty seconds. I was neither upset nor surprised. In my family, presents are provisional. They circulate. They migrate to the person who expresses the most enthusiasm, or a genuine need. Christmas and birthdays are less about sentiment and more about efficient redistribution.
Bob was a boyfriend I had for several years, whom I met on Tinder, to the delight and surprise of everyone I knew and who knew him. He was not a hook-up kind of guy of the type one might usually meet on Tinder. He was kind, gentle, prone to anxiety, the sort of man who apologises without needing to do so. He loved art and, when we met, was reengaging with his long-dormant desire to be a visual artist. I, meanwhile, had recently started singing again. Bob encouraged me to perform. He came to most of my early gigs, beaming in the audience like a true fan, until, as these things go, he got bored a couple of years in and began finding urgent reasons to stay home.
In the first year, though, we were spectacular. The most polished, generous, emotionally available versions of ourselves. So polished, in fact, that I completely ignored the gigantic red flag flapping in a gale behind him: his total dismissal of my sexual history, which was hardly hidden, considering it was documented in my bestselling erotic memoir. Bob insisted on referring to it as fiction. As though the word “memoir” were some avant-garde marketing ploy. I let it slide, because new love is a powerful hallucinogen and I didn’t want to spoil our fantasy romance. Eventually, when our love was less new, his insistence that I made up a decade of my life became a bone of contention until eventually, it broke us.
Nevertheless, and I will give the man his due, Bob was a very thoughtful partner in that first year. In fact, he remains the only man, yes, the only one, who ever constructed a 59th birthday for me (or any birthday) so elaborate, so indulgent, so carefully curated, that I will never, ever forget it. Bob could be extravagant. I try not to think about what the day cost him but I know it was alot, certainly several hundred pounds. But it was, without question, the best birthday I’ve ever had. Possibly in my entire life.
It began, as I believe all proper birthdays should, with food. On the morning itself, he took me to Bermondsey Street, in London, for a slap-up English breakfast. And I mean the works: fried eggs (slightly runny, as he knew I liked them), blood pudding, sausages, bacon, sourdough toast. Bob knew I love a good English breakfast, and this was one of them. The sausages were cooked to perfection, that precise resistance when you bite in, the faint crunch giving way to succulence. The bacon tasted properly cured and smoked, thick and unapologetic, like it had a backbone. The eggs bled gently across the plate waiting to be mopped up by the sourdough (of course) toast.
It was excessive. It was loving. It was exactly what I would have ordered myself, but somehow better for having been chosen for me.
After breakfast we took a slow, satisfied stroll down Bermondsey Street, popping into one shop after another in that way that you sometimes see couples do who have been comfortably together forever or, like us, still in the throes of first date energy. Bob picked up a neat pair of bookends, the exact shape escapes me now, but I suspect they were dogs because Bob loved dogs. He had a dog that had died a couple of years earlier and he still referred to her in the present tense (and spoke to her most evenings when not with me, he told me once). I found a russet‑coloured straw fedora that made me feel like a woman whom could have lived in Shoreditch, but spent weekends in Totnes, neither of which are true.
At noon, Bob glanced at his watch and said, with quiet purpose, “Onto our next stop.”
We walked further down the street and turned into The Bermondsey Square Hotel, where, to my complete surprise, Bob had booked a day room for us.
