CRAIG BROWN: Enjoying your birthday? How very un-British ~ VeraLPoker

Friday, February 27, 2015

CRAIG BROWN: Enjoying your birthday? How very un-British

By Craig Brown for the Daily Mail

Published: 00:49 GMT, 26 February 2015 | Updated: 01:07 GMT, 26 February 2015

Happy birthday, dear Bobby! Each year, President Mugabe loves nothing more than to celebrate his own birthday.

This Saturday, he is throwing a party, a few days late, for his 91st. As always, it will be a lavish affair. This year, the President has invited 20,000 of his closest friends to the Elephant Hills resort in Victoria Falls.

Funds for the knees-up, which will cost around $1million, have been raised by ‘public donation’. This year, a local businessman has kindly donated two elephants, two buffalos, two sable antelopes, a lion and five impala.

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President Mugabe is celebrating his 91st birthday with a big lavish party this Saturday where he will invite 20,000 of his closest friends to the Elephant Hills resort in Victoria Falls

These animals will be dead, rather than live, so I imagine they are destined for a huge game stew. Anyone know a good recipe for elephant and impala? Send for Delia!

The traditional British attitude to birthdays is, it must be said, rather less fulsome. Happy Birthday To You is widely regarded as one of the most depressing sing-alongs of all time, up there with Agadoo by Black Lace and Let Me Entertain You by the second most famous Robert, Robbie Williams.

If you look through the diaries of distinguished Britons, they tend to regard their birthdays as the low-point of their year. There is precious little celebration.

But distinguished Britons through history have tended to regard their birthdays as the low-point of their year including actor Kenneth Williams (pictured) who wrote that he threw all his cards in the dustbin

‘Got lots of birthday greetings & threw them all in the dustbin,’ writes Kenneth Williams, two years Mugabe’s junior, on his birthday in 1968. Seven years later, his birthday is still filling him with gloom. ‘Lots of cards which will go straight in the dustbin,’ he wrote on February 22, 1975.

In 1977, everyone at an Equity meeting attended by Williams spontaneously sings Happy Birthday To You, but it only makes him more dispirited. ‘Walked home feeling depressed, old, tired and very near to tears.’ Five years later, he celebrates his 56th birthday by going to see the film Death Wish II in Leicester Square.

In 1977, Kenneth Williams’s near-twin, the gloomy novelist John Fowles, is celebrating his birthday, with equal despondency. The fact that he has just handed a new novel to his publishers does nothing to cheer him up: in fact, quite the opposite.

‘My 51st birthday. Not good. I feel a growing depression; emptiness, staleness, boredom, after the last six months of work on the novel. Now it is dead, a corpse and its attendant vultures. The great folly of my life was not having learnt to drive . . . No one comes here, I go nowhere . . . And that old, old lack of ever having any intelligent discussion about anything with anyone.’

For most of us, the prospect of a birthday loses much of its fizz as we enter middle age. Others feel indifference even earlier.

On October 28, 1919, Evelyn Waugh records this in his diary: ‘It is extraordinary how unimportant birthdays become after a few years. Today has been a pleasant enough day but little out of the ordinary.’ He is only 16.

The day is not boosted by the arrival of a card from his brother Alec, saying simply: ‘No present: thanks for insulting my friends.’

Our birthdays encourage most of us to take stock, only to find our cupboards rather barer than we imagined. On August 9, 1958, the poet Philip Larkin celebrated, or uncelebrated, his 36th birthday with this letter to his girlfriend: ‘I suppose one’s birthday is a fit time for reflection. I find my life very scrappy . . . I feel I am on a dry dull stony road with nothing on either side but rubbish-dumps & filling stations.’

It’s all a far cry from the attitude of Mugabe, who seems to find each of his birthdays even more fun than the last. Sadly, our own politicians lack Mugabe’s cheerful outlook.

On August 9, 1958, the poet Philip Larkin (pictured) marked his 36th birthday with a letter to his girlfriend where he said he found his 'very scrappy'

Even that great bon viveur Roy Jenkins could prove a little out-of-sorts when the big day came. ‘My 57th birthday,’ he writes on November 11, 1977. ‘Not greeted with pleasure, particularly as no celebrations were scheduled during the extremely hard day ahead.’

Maverick Tory MP Alan Clark was always checking his face for signs of ageing, never more so than on his birthday.

‘Far too many people seem to know that today is my birthday, which of course I don’t like at all as it makes it more difficult for me to ignore the fact that I am 60,’ he writes on April 13, 1988.

‘I refuse to be 60 . . . Yesterday afternoon, I seemed glossy and confident. But this morning my face is swollen, and from some angles I could be an ill 60.’

And what does Mugabe see when he looks in the mirror? One wants him to see someone who is an ill 91, but, life being what it is, I suspect he sees a man of 21, full of beans, universally loved and raring to go. There’s no justice in this world, and particularly not on birthdays.

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