Twenty-ninth of the Sixth

Today was my twenty-first birthday. I wore a long black dress and a denim jacket that was my mother's from the Eighties, and a silver and moonstone ring my father bought me. We went to Brighton and sat on the smooth pebbles in the warm-cold sea-breeze, eating ice-creams in the watery sunlight. For lunch we'd had sushi and plum wine. We got soaked by choppy waves, and wasted 2p coins in the arcade, and gazed at jewellery in shop windows and later a seagull snatched a doughnut from me, in the split second pause between hand and mouth. I felt its wing brush my cheek. Later we lay on the damp grass by the pavillion, and the sky was forget-me-not blue. For dinner we ate cheese, salami and bread and kettle chips, and the salty wind blew my hair into my mouth, and whipped bruisy clouds about over the grey-green sea. In the car I slept and dreamt. Back home we had champagne, strawberries, and chocolate cake.

It was my mother's birthday too. Thirty-four years ago, on her twenty-first birthday, she wore a pink mohair cardigan and a yellow skirt. Her parents bought her a bicycle. Her beau took her to dinner and then to the pub, where she drank four Irish coffees and felt 'sick as a dog'. Then they went to the carnival. She didn't give her parents much of a thought, she admitted.

I wonder if she thought about me, back then. A future daughter conjured from nothing more than herself and some person she hadn't even met yet, who thirteen years later would be born on the very same day. Of course she didn't. But for the last twenty-one years she's thought of me every single day. I couldn't ask for more than that. I am sorry, of course, that she had to give half her birthday away to me, every year. She deserves a whole birthday. Or two like the Queen. Or three hundred and sixty five. But I must say I am grateful, and glad, to have shared twenty-one birthdays with someone who I love above all else.