Hold the jelly sweets – I may be too old to mark my birthday

‘The day doesn’t bother me. Just another. No better no worse. But the avalanche is appalling.” So Samuel Beckett, writing to a friend who had recklessly wished him a happy birthday. A footnote in the admirable Cambridge edition of Beckett’s letters explains that the avalanche was composed of superfluous birthday felicitations. Even when young, Beckett had a tendency to greet his birthday with a rousing chorus of “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to”. Still, his luxuriantly Eeyore-ish take on celebrating his three-quarter century raises an intriguing question: at what age is one too old to celebrate a birthday?

I should declare a personal interest. Today is my birthday, and my attitude to it falls somewhere between Beckett and Bad Harry. Bad Harry, you recall, is the delinquent best friend of My Naughty Little Sister in the glorious children’s stories of that name by Dorothy Edwards. His birthday celebrations involve “red jellies and yellow jellies, and blancmanges and biscuits and sandwiches and cakes-with-cherries-on, and a big birthday-cake with white icing on it and candles and ‘Happy Birthday Harry’ written on it”. Also he gets to wear “a blue party-suit, with white socks and shoes” – a dandyish ensemble that does nothing to undermine his legendary status as a hard nut, because he accessorises it with “a real man’s haircut”.

Bad Harry, admittedly, was about five years old when this extravaganza was provided by his doting parents. Somewhere in the seven decades between blancmange and appalling avalanche there falls a caesura – a birthday watershed, a moment of grown-upness where one (presumably) loses the taste for celebration, much as one loses the taste for the trifle decorated with jelly sweeties and silver balls that proved Bad Harry’s birthday nemesis.

But when? Eighteen might logically be the age after which one should mark birthdays only at the turn of the decades. Mine is not a “big” birthday in that sense. No zeros are involved. If newspaper typography ran to the ingenuity of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, I might indicate it with Corporal Trim’s elegant wordless squiggle. As it is, let us make do with an asterisk, thus: 5*.

It turns out that I share the date with an arresting congregation of notables, living and defunct; and my search for an appropriate celebration pauses briefly on the idea of a virtual party at which Nigel Farage (in blue party-suit with real man’s haircut) converses with the tea-swigging shade of Tony Benn, while the late Fat Lady, Jennifer Paterson, whoops it up with saintly George Herbert and litter-hating Iron Eyes Cody; Neville Cardus swaps batting averages with Clifford Gladwin; and Marlon Brando and Jane Goodall earnestly debate the courtship rituals of higher primates. Music is provided by a ghostly Serge Gainsbourg – a special favour, since his birthday falls a day ahead of ours.

Back in the real world, a practical solution to the birthday conundrum is to be found in Jennifer Paterson’s excellent cookery book, Feast Days, where she reworks the “great coffee cake” of her childhood birthdays for more mature anniversaries in the form of a “dark, dangerous and delicious” Devil’s food cake. Failing that, one can always rely on Sam Beckett for birthday cheer. On his 52nd birthday, in April 1958, he wrote: “I have received two dozen old stanchers [handkerchiefs]; I shall have to start crying again.”