A Happy Birthday

I turned 48 yesterday. Forty-eight. When put that way, it sounds Biblical. I am not quite feeding the five thousand, nor am I one of the twelve disciples, but I am now implicated in the declaration that forty people shared a meal.1

It was one of my happiest birthdays, full of low expectations exceeded with mellow surprises. And not trying too hard. There was no birthday cake, for instance. No candles. And although I have been playing peek-a-boo with a midlife crisis in recent weeks, there were no wishes to be anyone else or anywhere else.

Although it was Good Friday, the part of me that is proto-Christian is relatively quiet these days. I didn’t think about easter beyond telling my sons in passing that the idea of the resurrection is darkly fascinating and all about the centrality of sacrifice to human existence. They responded by reminding me to buy them easter eggs in time for Sunday.

Last year, I wrote here about the intricacy of the easter story. The best way to understand my birthday on Good Friday is that it felt more like Easter Saturday:

In the Christian tradition, the time between Good Friday when Christ was crucified and his resurrection on Easter Sunday is a moment of repose between despair and hope. That struggle with despair and hope defines the human condition, and Easter Saturday can therefore be seen as a microcosm of our whole lives. Perhaps the reason we don’t hear much about Easter Saturday is that we live it every day.

There was only one actual birthday card from my aunt Hazel in Aberdeen, now in her eighties. It featured a Zebra, connecting to a book I wrote 20 years ago called Chess for Zebras. She asked inside if I still liked Zebras. This tickled me and allowed me to share that the French edition of this book will come out this year with a funky cover:

There was only one present, a bottle of Talisker whisky, sent down from Scotland by my mum, but I’ll enjoy it all the more for the lateral connection with Iain McGilchrist (who lives in Talisker, Skye) and for being a birthday gift.

Unusually for my dad, he forgot to send me anything. Normally, his card arrives about a week early. I called as if to say “What’s going on?” and he said he just forgot,