Birthday

This year I had two birthdays, the first one was rubbish. On Thursday I worked late, then my motorbike threw it's chain off and I spent most of the rest of the day getting home and then fixing it. I also got a CD that I have no interest in listening to and a personalised birthday card that calls me a cunt (I was delighted with the CD and card).

On Friday I was taken out for lunch, I had a luxurious restful afternoon, and then we went to the pub. It was just like old times, except that:

• In the old days going to the pub on Friday was the default schedule rather than a special treat.
• Going out drinking wasn't very expensive.
• Every pub on Mutley Plane would have been full.
• we'd have arranged where and when to meet well in advance, nobody would have had a hand held radio telephone with which to confirm or modify the arrangements.
• The pubs would have had that wonderful tobacco and stale beer smell.
• Had we been laughing about someone with an upper class accent ordering a pint of Australian lager, and then desperately trying to remember what E. M. Forster wrote, nobody could have googled it. Moreover google wasn't a word we knew, specially not as a verb.
• The jukebox could never have had THAT many songs on it.

The unquenchable thirst, the drunken story telling, and the music over-appreciation however seem to be timeless.

Richard "Reminiscence isn't what it used to be" B