The Big Five Three

Plus Karaoke

It was my birthday last Wednesday. I am now officially fifty-three years old. I confess that I have been struggling with the notion of being fifty-three. It’s such a big number. It’s a number that has heft and gravitas. I have heft but I definitely don’t have gravitas. It feels like I gained access to this number through stealth and cunning, and eventually someone is going to come up to me and demand to see my licence. Shortly after this, I will be denounced as a fraud and put in ager’s prison or something.

This age has been causing me a lot of cognitive dissonance. There are days when I feel like a fossilised woman who has been reanimated in a Jurassic Park way and there are days when I feel that I am far too young to be allowed to make ‘these’ kinds of decisions about anything. Sometimes I feel these feelings at the same time as each other. It’s a lot.

I know that it’s traditional to get weirded out by ageing as the decades tick up and the zeros mount, but that’s never been my style. I get freaked out at random birthday numbers. I did panic about being forty, but I am so terrible with numbers that the year I panicked about it I was actually only turning thirty-eight, so even that didn’t work out. It makes me laugh that I am so dyscalculic that I genuinely can’t even panic about my age at the appropriate stop signs. This demonstrates more amply than anything else that age is just a number.

I think part of feeling the weight of my fifty-third-ness was the fact that in the week before birthday shenanigans commenced I managed to either trap a nerve or cross a rib, which caused my left tit to feel like I’d trapped it in a car door. The discomfort meant I slept very badly, and all the moving around caused my weak hip to wander, so then I trapped a nerve there too. With my left tit and my right hip out of action I was slightly deranged by the pain of it and extraordinarily aggrieved that I had reached the age where I could get injuries in my sleep. Creeping around the boat, using chairs as hand holds and behaving like I was scaling K2 with no oxygen made me feel every one of my fifty-three years and a few extra decades for good measure.

I was mostly back to my normal self by Wednesday which was rather nice. Jason took me out for lunch. I had a legendary tuna melt where they used halloumi instead of cheddar and my mind blew exponentially with the wonder of it all. I had a Fiona Cairn’s birthday cake, bucking the trend of our standard family go-to of Colin the Caterpillar. You’ve got to a live a little, and I think the halloumi epiphany allowed me to expand my horizons in all culinary directions. What a time to be alive.

By Thursday lunchtime all my children and some of my children-in-law had arrived at the boat and it was bedlam. The only missing person on my list of best beloveds was Bred, my daughter Tilly’s partner. As he’s a nurse in children’s A&E he gets special dispensation for absences due to the fact that he has a proper job saving lives instead of titting around like the rest of us do. I missed him but I was also secretly quite grateful as finding places for seven people to sleep on the boat is just about manageable, but I’m not sure where we would have stashed him if he had managed to come.

I was thoroughly spoiled. The girls took me out for lunch and then there were gifts and cake in the afternoon. The main event though was in the evening where we all schlepped over to Bloomsbury Lanes for an evening of karaoke shenanigans in which we sang ourselves hoarse.

I was terrified of doing karaoke for years but I always really wanted to do it. I just couldn’t get over myself enough to step up until a couple of years ago. I think if it had been a thing when I was younger, alcohol would have lubricated the raging anxiety sufficiently for me to have a crack at it, but by the time it became mainstream I barely drank and everyone else had got it out of their system, so I was high and dry. Then, in a year when everything really was terrible I was genuinely able to ask myself ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen?’ It turned out it was significantly less worse than what was actually happening, so I jumped in.

My initial forays were fun, but they happened in a very weird karaoke bar in Leicester that had a limited menu of recognisable song choices. I didn’t get to sing my song of choice, which is A New England by Kirsty MacColl, so my birthday wish was to go and belt out Kirsty in a room with my beloveds, and it happened. It was great. We ate pizza the size of a coffee table. Everyone else had cocktails and I had a milkshake and we sang and sang and sang. It made me feel significantly less ancient than my official age and I can heartily recommend it if you need your spirits lifting.

I had been making a list of songs I wanted to sing for some months prior to the event and we managed to sing a fair number of them, and fit in everyone else’s choices too. I love a list so I’ll finish with my choices. Please feel free to recommend others in the comments section. Everyone had such a good time we already have plans to go again.

Katy’s Karaoke:

A New England - Kirsty MacColl

Walk Like A Panther - Tony Christie and The All Seeing I

It Must Be Love and/or Wings Of A Dove - Madness

Caravan of Love and/or Happy Hour - The Housemartins

You Can Call Me Al - Paul Simon

Birdhouse In Your Soul - They Might Be Giants

Son Of A Preacher Man - Dusty Springfield

Born To Run - Frankie Goes to Hollywood version. Not Bruce Springsteen

Teenage Dirtbag - Wheatus

I Am The Mob - Catatonia

One Day Like This and/or Lippy Kids - Elbow

The Chauffeur - Duran Duran

Denis Denis - Blondie

Raise Your Glass - Pink

Kids and/or Rock DJ - Robbie Williams (and Kylie Minogue)

Your Song and/or I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues - Elton John

Absolute Beginners - David Bowie

Don’t Leave Me This Way - The Communards

Back For Good - Take That

Something To Talk About - Badly Drawn Boy

Don’t Tell Me - Madonna

The Fear - Lily Allen

Foundations - Kate Nash

Wired For Sound - Cliff Richard (A long standing family joke song)

Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol

Ninety-Nine Red Balloons - Nena

You’ve Got To Fight For Your Right (To Party) and/or No Sleep Till Brooklyn - Beastie Boys