The best present I have ever had

Saturday was my 43rd birthday and I celebrated it in a carbon-copy office block in Istanbul working on a migration project. There are, of course, worse places to be for your birthday; a lightly armed Humvee in Helman Provence comes immediately to mind.

My birthdays have always been very low-key affairs; by low-key I of course mean, “completely overlooked by everyone.” I’m not the kind of person whose birth is either remembered or celebrated and, it must be said, I have never encouraged either. The fact is that anytime my family, current girlfriend or wife attempted to plan a do for my birthday, they found it very difficult to find attendees.

When I was in my teens my parents found that the only way to get kids to show up for my birthday parties was to offer some sort of bribe. A particularly painful and humiliating experience for both my parents and myself occurred on my 15th birthday when a group of my supposed friends refused to meet me at a local skateboard park unless we paid for their yearly memberships. After this was done the lot of them proceeded to mock and ridicule my lack of skills, my attire and in general made the entire event one of the more traumatic experiences of my youth. Money can’t buy you love but it would seem it can buy you abuse and derision.

Even by my diminished standards, this year’s showing has been particularly poor: a card from my mum, a card from my current girlfriend, and three e-mails. Parental units number two have forgotten completely and while some people at work get a desk full of confetti, cards and balloons on their birthdays, I know that upon my return to the office I will have a desk empty save for piles of junk mail and, for some reason, discarded green pens.

Three years ago, on the eve of my 40th, my partner gave it a good go and tried to organize something a bit special. The best that she could manage was for me to share a celebration with her 29 year-old Niece. This would have been fine except my incusing in the festivities was obviously an after-thought to the point that when Happy Birthday was sung, it was sung to the Niece and then, after an embarrassed pause, “and Mark too” was hastily added. Can’t you just feel the love?

Contrast this with my partner’s birthdays which are expected to be celebrated for at least a month (her 40th managed to be strung out for an entire year), garner a wheelbarrow full of cards, stacks and stacks of presents, memorable nights on the town and a long-weekend getaway, preferably to someplace warm and expensive where she can flirt shamelessly with the waiters.

There is a wee bit of inequity on the presents front also. It must be said, in all humility, that I do great presents. I quite like finding cool and special gifts for people; not overwhelming but on-target. My partner on the other hand will tend to panic-buy and grab the first thing that her hands touch in a shop regardless of its suitability for the recipient. Or, barring that will slide into a pattern of repetition. Her female family members have received either scarves or earrings for the past five years running and, based on a conversation I had with her last week, the streak will continue this Christmas as well.

Allow me to share with you the birthday presents my Significant Other found for me over the past few years:
• A visit to a shop where I was fitted for an Aeron chair (the chair itself failed to materialize)
• Nothing
• A pair of shoes purchased after I took her to the shop, picked them out and said “yes please” when she asked if she should pay for them

Over the past few years my birthdays have taken a nasty turn for the sinister. Four years ago on my birthday my partner’s brother-in-law, universally loved and admired by all who met him, handsome, well-built, intelligent, 54, had a cerebral aneurism and died while he was out boating. Exactly one year later my only American friend in London died after suffering a horrible seizer.

I only just found out that this year, on my birthday naturally, my father also had a seizer and was rushed to the hospital where he proceeded to have another even worse one. Stacks of tests were run but nothing conclusive was found. The current best guess theory is that his anti-seizer medication might have caused the episodes. Hopefully this same logic does not apply to birth control pills.

Having a birthday during the first week of November means that my special day always falls on or around US elections. The last eight years have produced very little in the way of joyous surprises and in fact, if I were a drinking man, I would have greeted the dawns of my birthdays in 2000 and 2004 looking up at the world from the gutter outside whatever pub was the last one I was thrown out of.

Things were a little different this year.

I am under no illusion that Barack Obama will fulfil all my liberal dreams. He’s going to piss me off as he struggles to find the centre and reach a consensus within his own party. The death penalty won’t go away, the culture of gun ownership will continue to thrive and those genetically defective racists in the Deep South will continue to hate Obama because he has a “Muslim sounding name.”

Let’s not forget that the Republicans, with the ferocity of a bear defending her young. will fight every one of his proposals, no matter how rational, no matter how beneficial for the country. He will yield, at times, to political expediency and his programs will be tempered by a bankrupt treasury, a crippling financial crisis and a world which views the Unites States as a vicious thug. He is about to step into the hardest job in the world; with the highest expectations stacked on his shoulders and with 47% of the country hoping he will fail so that they can say “I told you so.”

And yet…

And yet, if only 40, 30, 20% of the changes he promised on the campaign trail ever become reality we will be the better for it. If he can alter the tone in Washington from one of secrecy and deceit to openness and dialogue, he will have accomplished a great deal. If, and it’s a huge “if”, he can deftly negotiate the ruins left by his predecessor and somehow, someway, reverse the fortunes of America, stop her moral compass from spinning and rebuild her position within the eyes of a sceptical and cynical world; if he can manage to survive without falling victim to one of those slack-jawed rednecks, then maybe, just maybe, some of my birthday wishes will come true. I couldn’t ask for a better present than that.