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Oh Flange, I’m 53.
To be fair it’s not a big milestone and feels exactly the same as 52, so no biggie.
It’s 40 years since I became a teenager. I tried to remember what I did on my 13th birthday, but I can’t remember. I can’t really remember what I did on my 52nd birthday either though. This is the problem with being 53.
We had boiled eggs for breakfast, something we don’t do too often. I hadn’t realised until recently but the way my wife opens boiled eggs is an aberration. This is why you should really get to know someone properly before you marry them. And four years courting including two years of living together did not prove to be enough. Marry in haste. I know there is a bit in Gulliver’s Travels about a society at war over which way up a boiled egg should be eaten, but I don’t care about that. It’s crazy to go to war over something some trivial. What my wife does is way worse and I think would justify a nuclear strike. Rather than simply and cleanly beheading the egg, she taps it with a spoon and then peels it like one might with a hard boiled egg. But this isn’t a hard boiled egg. It’s soft boiled. And she’s doing this at the table, so all the little bits of egg end up on the plate where her soldiers are. I know you’re wondering how you avoid getting all those bits caught up in your dipping and in your mouth and the answer is that you don’t. She’s insane. And yet I am married to her now and there is no way out.
I think I would have the strength to get through this, but the problem with this is that without me noticing (probably because I was writing my blog at the breakfast table like I am now) she has taught the kids that this is the correct way to eat a boiled egg. She’s passed this curse on to another generation and they will not listen to me when I tell them they’re doing it wrong and I can prevent them ending up with a mouth full of egg shell. If I was a younger man I could leave this broken family behind and try again and meet a woman who eats soft-boiled eggs correctly. But it’s too late. Perhaps I can uncondition them or at least the youngest one who can’t have this blasphemy quite as engrained yet. But I don’t think so.
All I can do it try to entreat any of you that aren’t married to not make the same mistake as I did and please use your courting time properly.
We had a lovely birthday round at the inlaws though. My wife may not know how to eat eggs, but in other ways she is amazing (not enough to make up for the egg thing) and she bought me a game I’d never heard of called Kubb -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubb and we had a thrilling game in the garden, when we were a team against her father-in-law and a family friend. We went behind to a degree where all looked hopeless, with a sneaky kubb right behind the king where it was very hard to hit. We were already discussing the next match. But then in an audacious move I took out the hidden kubb and the match swung (a classic Herring Manoeuvre) and I had a sudden spell of form after being terrible for about an hour. My wife had three shots to take down the King and did it on her first. A birthday victory. Recommended game, though you need quite a big playing area of 8m by 5m, so we can’t do it in our own garden.
It was Flying Ant Day. It transpired that neither my wife or any of her family had ever heard of this phenomenon and didn’t believe it was a thing, even though a colony of ants was vacating a nest under the steps down into their garden and most of them were flying. I have long thought my wife might be an alien sent to be impregnated by the prime specimen of humanity, but this and the egg thing must confirm that. How is it possible to have lived for decades and not heard or noticed this? It’s not.
If you are thinking of getting married, add this to your checklist.
One of the thrills of being a comedian is that every now and again (and usually on my birthday) I get a call from the great Barry Cryer. He rang me this afternoon to wish me happy birthday and check up on our health (thankfully he has got through the virus so far healthy and happy) and to tell me a joke. It was a new one about Covid 19, which I wouldn’t do justice to, that involved an airline pilot working from home. He got his laugh and was off. What a fucking legend he is. What a wonderful birthday gift. I hope I get it for many years to come. But pretty sure Cryer will outlive me.
I even got to choose our film tonight and so could choose something that didn’t pass the Bechdel Test and went for Angel Has Fallen, the third instalment in the ridiculous trilogy of movies about an increasingly ageing Gerald Butler saving the President from terrorists. It’s nonsense of course, but it’s well done nonsense and this film boasts an impressive cast and some top notch acting and though much of the plot is predictable, it throws up enough surprises to keep you on your toes. And though she doesn’t really talk to any other women, Jada Pinkett Smith is great in the Tommy Lee Jones role in this Fugitive knock off.
The ridiculous final scene where (spoilers) Butler offers his resignation to the President after saving his life for the third time is a particular delight if you are interested in macho men who can only express their emotions via notions of honour in a slightly homoerotic way.
I am not interested in that though. And anyone who says I am is lying.
