Birthday bulbs

The kitchen table has turned into a garden centre with floral overtones

Every year my birthday is celebrated with colour and cards since everybody knows I’m an overgrown baby. Any excuse for a celebration.
The nurses in the dialysis unit overhead a zoom call and brought in a speaker, ‘Happy Birthday’ was played very loudly, the nurses clapped, sung out of tune and jiggled around, a tiny nurse from Indonesia brought in a plate of biscuits including a ‘Jammy Dodger’. I dropped crumbs all over the bed and returned home one year older.
The Northern fellow and dawter accompanied me to ‘The Griffin Inn’, a very old pub in Fletching. I had beer battered haddock, chips and mushy peas. A disgraceful bellyful of anti kidney food.
The native Americans believe we have a death cycle a few weeks before our birth day – we feel discombobulated, irritable and usually set about dropping old habits as we prepare for our birthing day when we are then reborn. They call it ‘re-membering’, when we put ourselves together gain. Remembering.
Love it.

On Tuesday we were taken out to lunch at the ‘Beacon’ in Tea Garden Lane in Tunbridge Wells. A whole chicken, sitting on a pole, had been steamed and roasted, carried majestically to the table and then carved. I wore a pink suit which ended up with chicken gravy spattered all over the cuffs, I ate the bird like Henry Eighth.
We’d celebrated on Saturday night with three friends, eating food made by the dawter, and on Sunday the grandchildren arrived with boyfriends and home made cards.
Today my nephew came from Portugal and brought yet more tulips for the table.
My body is now recovering from sour dough and too much cheese, but by jove if you can’t indulge on the day of your birth when can you.

My mother was exemplary when regaling my entrance into the world. I was born at 2.20am in Mile End hospital, Bancroft Road, East London. I was born alone too, my young mother ignored when she said I was on the way, so I came into this world unaided. Dark skinned, loads of black hair and the independence of a child born without help. There are those that say we live our lives in the manner of our birth – you could stay I have been independent and a survivor for 76 years.
Seventy bleeding Six. George Forman has just died and he was my age-ish.
Some years ago I was told by a Yaruban witch that I would live until I was 96, this kidney shite has made me wonder whether that age is possible. The slightest twinge, the slightest wobble, the tiniest muscle spasm and a little bit of me panics. Day by day is the only way to tackle the demons.
I do not have a bucket list, after all where can I go without q dialysis machine at hand. I can’t travel, can’t go abroad, can’t sit by a pool, can’t pad through sand, can’t sit al fresco whilst sucking on a crab. But I can arrange a new operation.

The dialysis diary now includes the ‘fistula’ entry. Joining up a vein and an artery in the arm, waiting for it to adhere, which takes around six weeks, then a general anaesthetic to remove the ‘line’ from my chest. If it all goes well I will then be able to swim and use the jacuzzi and sit in a sauna and sweat in the steam room. I can pretend I am in a spa in Thailand. Then I have to manifest that I will be one of those lucky folk who doesn’t have to have dialysis three days a week, that I can get away with a couple of outings. I have to believe that my body is repairing itself. If I’ve created the problem can I solve it through thought? Ken Dodd prayed three times a day and he lived till he was 90……
It’s a funny old process. I can only drink a tiny bit every day and then weigh myself. My ‘dry’ weight has to be maintained and then the calculated fluid in my body is removed. My legs jump around and I chew my cheeks with the discomfort. Pam, the Jamaican nurse, gets it and turns off the machine when it gets too uncomfortable, but mostly I have to count down the hours.
Fours hour hooked up to the bloody machine – literally as I watch my blood churn round. I pass the first hour eating the toast and biscuits they deliver, the second hour I attempt to meditate and for the final 120 minutes I watch a film.
After four hours I pack up my bag, fold my electric blanket (it gets really cold lying there) pack it in a bag for life then walk to the car.
I drive myself home to an ‘oosbind and a laid fire.

I am drained and very, very irritable, a pain in the arse, by 5.00 o’clock I am resettled. I can read again and have become interested in the news, although why I should want to watch that orange arsehole sign pieces of paper that dismantles American democracy is beyond me.
I recently bought a sponge brick to throw at the telly.

So here I am 76 years old, I asked a little boy of eight how old he thought I was, he looked at me his head to one side and declared I was 29. I gave him a fiver. I asked another little fellow how old he thought I was and he eyed me up, pushed his face into his mothers legs, shyly looked back at me and said, sotto voce, that he thought I was 96.
Oh how we laughed!!!!!!
Thank you to everybody who sent me splendid birthday greetings, and cards and flowers. I appreciate every one of you and am suitably touched.