Just Stick To The Cake

And so it has arrived, the Day of my Half Century. The most feared day, the Day of Reckoning. When one has to finally face reality, take account of failures and shortcomings, measure the road travelled so far knowing full well that what lies ahead is short indeed.

But how to celebrate this birthday like no other? A trivial birthday party won’t do. This momentous day that separates the “I Will Be” from the “I Was”, this moment of passage between maturity and over-ripeness cannot be wasted with trifles and trinkets.

No, I say! I will leave behind my lovely Florence and my lovely family with their cheerful little faces and their joyful birthday songs, I will renounce the fat slice of cake and the “Birthday Boy” badge that are my birthright. I will go far away and spend my birthday alone, looking for Truth and Wisdom.

So farewell I say, on my bike I jump, up and down the rolling green hills of Tuscany I ride, then up and down a few more … and then yet some more, till I start thinking that the Tuscan gods might have overdone it a bit with the rolling hills and that in fact a few plains here and there would not have spoiled the landscape at all.

For hours and hours I ride and finally I get to the ancient harbour of Porto Venere, where a modernday Charon, for the very reasonable fare of four euro, ferries me to the mysterious island of Palmaria. I climb up the island and descend to the southern shore, fighting on the way a colony of seagulls, mightily pissed off by the intrusion of a naked ape into their nesting grounds. They croak, hedgehop and shit-bomb me, but, making excellent use of my opposable thumbs, I swing and sway a wooden club over my head and force my way through this foul horde of descendants of the dinosaurs.

I finally reach the rocky shore and slide into the fresh and dandy, if slightly polluted, Mediterranean and there, while gently cooling the family jewels in the sacred waters of the cradle of civilisation, I purposefully and resolutely gaze into the horizon. The infinite and ever changing surface of the Old Sea is the mirror of my soul, I scour it for a sign, something that might help me make sense of my life so far and give me a hint of what lies ahead.

And what I see is … a silly little plastic red buoy with a drab-looking motorboat anchored to it, with two oldish-looking guys on board. I softly murmur to myself “what the bloody f…” but then I hear a loud rumble. It’s not, as I initially assume, the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse or those which brought down the mighty walls of Jericho, it’s just one of the oldish guys who has started its Yamaha outboard engine. It’s almost lunch time and he must be keen to get back onshore. I have a short vision of him sitting contently under a Tuscan sun in front of a large slice of lasagne and a cool glass of white wine and then, all of the sudden, the veil of ignorance falls from my eyes and I see Truth in her stark naked beauty. Truth is quite the exhibitionist and she likes nothing better than to appear all rounded, ripe and very very naked in the mind of easily impressionable people. But I digress.

Where was I? Ah yes, and then I cry, my salty tears flow into the salty waters of the Mare Nostrum, mixing with those shed by Dido on the day of the egress of Aeneas. I cry sour tears for my lost youth, my lost dreams and, more to the point, my lost birthday cake. But I also cry sweet tears, for I found the Answer and it will bring great jubilation. I shall rush home, the harbinger of joyful tidings, and, in passing, check if my folks have upheld the minimum standards of human decency and left me a slice of the good stuff in the fridge.

So all the way back I go, up the island I climb, down to the shore I descend and across the sea I sail, over the green rolling hills of Tuscany I ride - then up and down a few more, and then a few more still - till I conclude that hills are vastly overrated and I should really move to the Netherlands or suchlike.

Finally I am back in my lovely Florence, in my lovely house, in the midst of my lovely family, in front of my lovely MacBook Pro, and from this vantage point, dear young friends that have not yet reached this milestone and tremble in anticipation of the Day, I can tell you in Truth and in Truth only that you should not fear, because the raw, unpasteurized, gluten and sugar-free reality is that your fiftieth birthday is just another stupid day in your life ¹.