Joe Bennett: Birthdays are marker posts on one's journey through life

There is nothing to say about birthdays, and we say it. Or rather we sing it, writes Joe Bennett. Photo / Getty Image

A DOG'S LIFE

Ah birthdays. It all starts with birthdays, the lifelong business of delusion. Beginning with - though I never had one - the birthday party.

I remember attending only two. The first was for a fat little boy who lived round the corner in Meadows Rd. I may have been 4 years old and he much the same.

My mother took me and there was orange squash to drink in thin glass glasses. At home I drank out of plastic beakers. I bit on the rim of my thin glass glass and it shattered and I felt the broken glass on my tongue and between my lower lip and my teeth and I wailed and the mothers descended and tweezers were put to work but oh I can still hear the crunch and feel the shudder.

(At university I knew a man whose party trick was to eat wine glasses. He'd bite a piece off, audibly chew it, swallow and do it again. He left only the stems. I was impressed, though not enough to have remembered his name. I presume he is dead.)

At the other birthday party, perhaps two years later, I was older, bolder and worse. There were games organised with prizes promised. I won a game but got either no prize or a prize I thought inadequate.

I pursued the mother of the host child for what I considered my due. Whenever she turned round there I was with my sense of injustice and my hands out ready to receive. And I won. She forked out. Lessons learned all round.

For me, persistent whinging isn't pretty but it pays. For her, why hold birthday parties?

To delude the child, is the answer. To convince it that, among the seven billion people on the planet, the seven thousand million apes, it is special. Religions play the same trick, declaring that good old god has got his eye on every one of us and we are precious.

Or if not god, the universe, the great distributor of karma, making sure we get what we deserve for being who we are.

"It is the stars, the stars above, that govern our condition," said I forget which character in King Lear, and the belief persists that those impossibly distant lumps of rock and molten rock and gas and nothing else are intimately involved with us, so we are Taurus apes, or Cancer or whatever, according to the day when we are born.

Who doesn't know his or her birthday? The heart leaps when it's mentioned. Me, I'm 20th of April, and - feel free to note this in your things-to-do book - I like presents I can drink.

Not so, however, my fellow April 20th boy, Mr Schicklgruber of Austria, who went on to become Mr Hitler of Germany. He was a teetotaller and vegetarian. But we are of the identical astrological sign so we must be effectively identical in nature, meaning that he was only ever one sip away from discovering the nightly consolation of scotch, and I am only a Panzer division short of invading Poland.

Meet someone who shares your birthday and ooh what a coincidence. But there are 366 possible birthdays. Divide seven billion by 366 and you arrive at a number in the thousands of millions. Thousands of millions of coincidences aren't coincidences. They're stats. Adolf and I share our birthday with 1500 people in Christchurch alone. Oh but we are special.

Dates are fiction. Time doesn't do them. Time does only the relentless onward march, not unlike the caterpillar track on one of those Panzers I haven't got. The track is the perpetual present, the ubiquitous now, and it picks itself up after. There's nothing behind when it's moved on and nothing ahead till it gets there. It is always and forever and only now. But not with us.

We count time and bang stakes into it to which we attach shreds of bunting saying tomorrow, or yesterday, or 1066, or Woo Hoo My Birthday. All of them consoling self-delusions. Time doesn't care.

Jumbled in the common box
Of their dark stupidity,
Orchid, swan and Caesar lie.
Time that tires of everyone
Has corroded all the locks,
Thrown away the key for fun.

There is nothing to say about birthdays, and we say it. Or rather we sing it. Happy birthday to you, we sing, and then we run out of ideas and sing it again, and then we sing the name and then to ram the point home we sing happy birthday to you. It's as circular and without meaning as time's tank track. It is perfect.