Right. The announcement is done.
I could not hire a real aeroplane, so this is what you get, and it cost considerably less than the cake you are about to cut. Keep going. There is more of this than you are expecting.
The fourth of September, again
Happy Birthday, Meera
Two years ago you spent this day on the platform at Reading with a supermarket cake and a candle you had to hold in your hand. This year I have built you somewhere to sit down.
Meera
Here since
cups of tea, roughly
Not one of those days wasted, whatever you say about the boring ones.
Before the balloons
The year you drove us all to the sea.
You passed on the third attempt and then sat in the car park at Hanger Lane for ten minutes before telling anybody, which is the most Meera sequence of events I can think of.
Six weeks later you drove four of us to Whitstable in November with the heater stuck on cold, and made everyone eat chips on a bench in the wind, and every single person who was there still says it was the best day they had all year.
There was also the spring, when work went badly for about six weeks and you mentioned it to nobody until it had already sorted itself out. I noticed. I did not say anything at the time because you obviously did not want me to. So I am saying it here, in writing, where you cannot change the subject or start washing up.
There is a cake. Go on.
This one has a proper candle, and nobody is announcing a replacement bus service over the top of it. Drag the knife through.
Tap to cut it
Six of them. Pop the lot.
There is a reason inside each one, and none of them are about the date.
0 of 6 popped
Pick one. Only one.
Four things I would give you for this year. You only get to take one, which is the point.
Choose one. Only one opens.
Yours, technically
The one from the Tesco car park
One in the morning on results day. You had the car door open and one foot on the tarmac and played it four times before either of us said anything.
Turn them over.
The front is what happened. The back is what I remember about it.
Turn them over
A year of you
Mostly unposed, mostly badly lit, all kept.
Things you say about yourself.
The front is yours. The back is mine. Tap one.
The part nobody says to you
You are the person who holds the torch.
Whenever anybody is under a sink or behind a boiler or halfway inside a car bonnet, you are the one holding the phone up so they can see, and you hold it for as long as it takes, and you never once look at your own screen while you do it.
It is the same instinct as burning the first pancake on purpose so nobody else gets the bad one. The same instinct as staying outside at that wedding for two hours with the bride’s aunt, who still sends you a card every December and has never once sent me one.
Nobody puts that on a birthday card because it does not sound like much. It is nearly the whole of what makes you good to be near.
A supermarket cake.
A candle held in your hand.
A train that never came.
And you told everybody
it was the best one you had had.
Stuck around the flat, roughly where they belong
Tap one to read it
Open this one on your own.
Open it
Happy birthday, Meera.
Twenty-seven of these now, and this is the first one I have got properly right.
made for you, over several evenings