God what a bore Birthdays can be. My own perhaps being the biggest bore of all. The mounting stress of the organising, and then the pressure in execution, the wanting of people to have a good time, whilst simultaneously personally trying to make the night worth all the money makes it perhaps my most dreaded time of year.
Of course I feel the nostalgic sadness the morning after, the ‘oh, its all over’ feeling, but the year definitely seems to go by faster when youre dreading your next birthday. At the age of 23, i can’t say the ‘getting older’ dread has settled in yet, i am told that comes at about 25, when you are getting nearer to 30 than 20 day-by-day.
The reason I write about birthdays today, is because i am going to a birthday night out this evening. It’s a close childhood friend of mine and the people going are a great bunch. However, there is one fatal flaw in the evening already. She hasn’t planned it in the slightest.
With London being such a big city, anywhere you choose to go out, there will be people who have had to travel a fair way to get there. Therefore, it is only fair to have a plan, be it a table somewhere or even just guestlist for a bar or two. You simply cannot expect people to travel for over an hour to be squished against a wall in a stinky, small pub with 50 overenthusiastic suits getting high on the fact its finally Friday. Or even worse, the dreaded huddle that one wouldn’t wish on even the skankiest of hoes, where you are all left frozen and mortified out in the street, being refused entrance because a bunch of screaming girls booked out the whole guest-list for their 18th birthday. Mortifying!
My Graduate Afterlife 