This month is depressing.
With the festivities over for another year, everyone’s back at work, eking out their last few pennies until the most painfully distant payday of the year finally makes a long-awaited appearance. It’s grim.
So let’s PARTAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!!
Yes, you heard me. It’s not all about you and your gas bill. Some of us have a January birthday to celebrate. So get your dancing shoes on, pop a bottle of Prosecco and turn the tunes up to 11!
It’s my big day, and I require the same amount of celebration, gift-giving and unfaltering attention as those with birthdays in any other month. This, however, won’t happen.
Headache, you say? Something’s come up at the last minute? The dog’s got the squits? Yeah, yeah, I get it. Stop with the excuses and say it like it is. It’s January and you can’t be arsed.
The January birthday. The blight of the celebratory calendar. The ones people pray that, perhaps if you ignore them, they might just go away.
And I’m not talking about the early January birthdays, which friends and family can usually be persuaded to carry on the party for.
No, I mean the end-of-the-month birthdays. When boilers across the country break down in synchronised unison, when the booze-addled Auld Lang Synes of New Year feel like months ago and the summer hols seem eons away.
When it’s cold and wet. When no one is in the mood for a birthday, or a party, and the last thing anyone wants to do is fork out for a present for some wastrel who had the bare-faced cheek to be born in the wrong month.
At my last birthday, it became clear after several last-minute cancellations, that the table I’d booked for 10 in a Mexican restaurant would just be the usual Three Amigos – me and my two friends – who also have January birthdays. As we share the same misfortune, we make the effort for each other when we know others might not.
The only time having a January birthday was an advantage was when it snowed so heavily on my 16th that the school closed and we spent all day sledging down the embankment on an old cardboard box. Not sure my friends would do that now though.
People, of course, find a canny way round the present-buying – regifting. A deceptive word for fobbing us off with some old tat you got for Christmas. Surely we’ll never twig that you’ve made absolutely no effort in choosing us a heartfelt gift, like we always do for you on your spring, summer and autumn birthdays.
Well, here’s the thing. We know. We can smell the whiff of unwanted gifts a mile off. Sometimes literally. Usually cheap gift sets of Superdrug hand cream or a Lush set marked down in the January sales. With the price tag still on.
The damaged Christmas selection box, books you’ve already read or have no interest in. Sometimes there’s a bookmark still on page seven or, ‘To Johnny, with love from Auntie Barbara’ scrawled on the inside cover.
I once got what, at first glance, looked to be a lovely mohair throw, but on closer inspection turned out to be a dog blanket (I don’t have a dog). And the ‘barely worn’ trainers still in the box were an interesting fashion statement. But my favourites are the unwanted kitchen appliances – the hand whisk, the electric juicer or the ice-cream-maker. Fingers crossed that a superfluous air-fryer comes my way this year.
And all because we had the nerve to come into the world at what everyone else considers to be the most inconvenient time of year.
The January-born. Not for us the barmy, balmy, mid-summer birthday celebrations, the gazebo in the garden, lit with fairy lights and crammed with revellers. Nor the celebratory gathering in the sunny pub garden, the riverside picnic or the tipsy weekend under canvas, partying under the stars. Not unless anyone wants to freeze to death.
But don’t worry, those of you with your joys-of-spring or midsummer-madness birthdays can rest assured that we’ll be there on your big day, having sold a kidney to afford the prices at that expensive rooftop bar in Mayfair.
But forgive me if your present this year is wrapped in Christmas paper and seems slightly familiar. Enjoy it the second time round.
So, as you sit there this week, consumed with self-pity, frantically cancelling direct debits and turning off lights to save on the lecky, maybe stop for a moment, check your birth date privilege and spare a thought for those of us whose birthdays land in the calendar’s most miserable month.
This year’s celebration will be a quiet one, but on my terms for once. I’ve finally given up. I’ve relieved the other two Amigos of their annual duty.
This birthday will consist of me wearing a onesie in front of the three-bar heater, a cup of PG in my special-occasion mug and a whole chocolate birthday cake to myself. You can stay at home in your PJs guilt-free with my blessing.
I am, however, still open to receiving presents…
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