No Candles Expected

On Monday I'm due to fly out to China again and consequently will miss having my birthday at home. This isn't a big deal - it's not like I was going to wake up to a brand new motorbike, a hot tub with three naked girls in it and a whole roasted pig on a spit - but Mrs Bison likes to make a bit of an effort and I would probably have got a big cake shaped like something obscene, and a cup of tea in bed. There's really not a lot to celebrate at this age - it's not like I'm a kid, getting more grown up and closer to the age when I can legally drive / drink / leave school, and I'm not yet at the age where every successive birthday is treated as a fucking miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming odds. It's just a chance to get a home-made cake.

Anyway, since I'll be with a bunch of colleagues it's always possible that my secretary will have tipped them off and that we'll celebrate in some traditional Chinese way. She's thoughtful like that, but they're blokes and consequently programmed not to give a shit about birthdays. There was always the possibility that Chinese birthday traditions were more exotic than ours. For instance, it might have been expected that the birthday boy got a bottle of scotch, a massage and a happy ending, so I did a bit of research just in case. It turns out that the Chinese have a depressing tradition around birthdays: if you're a kid you might get some money in a red envelope, and if you're turning 60 you should expect a celebration which might involve long noodles and an egg.

What's the deal with that? I understand that noodles are supposed to symbolize long life but what a depressing way to celebrate six decades on the planet.

"Thank you, honored son. What is this that you have brought me on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday?"

"It is some noodles father. To symbolize my wish of long life for you."

"Noodles. That's the best you could do is it? Would it have been too much to ask that I got a piece of cake. Maybe with chocolate? What are we having for dinner?"

"Frog ovaries in a papaya, dog penis soup and fish heads."

"Just kill me now will you?"

Anyway, the Chinese pay no attention to birthdays between childhood and old age so I'm not going to get any unexpected bonus celebration. Not even the noodles. What the fuck do they know anyway? According to their calendar I was born in the year of the sheep. Here's a list of the positive traits I'm supposed to exhibit:

Righteous, sincere, sympathetic, mild-mannered, shy, artistic, creative, gentle, compassionate, understanding, mothering, determined, peaceful, generous, seeks security.

Now a lot of you have been coming to this site for a while and I'm pretty sure you've figured out that I score low on most of those and zero on some. (Mild-mannered and mothering??) But just in case there's any doubt that this is, in fact, a load of old bollocks, let's examine another "sheep" born in the same year as me - Mr Ian Kay, better known as the Woolworths Killer, and also famous for stabbing the Yorkshire Ripper and blinding him in one eye while incarcerated in Broadmoor maximum security psychiatric hospital. He was later quoted as saying: "I was going to walk into the room and cut his jugular vein on both sides and wait there until he was dead." Yeah, he was pretty peaceful wasn't he?

What's the point of all this? Well, since the whole Chinese calendar / birth year tradition is crap I see no reason to observe any of their other traditions either. As a consequence I'm going to insist on a cake and some scotch at the absolute minimum. And definitely no ovaries.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison