Happy Birthday Matt Black !

Posted by Katy Regan at 22:11 on 16 Sep 2009

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I have an image in my head of the not too distant future (though if it gets any more distant we’ll all be holidaying on the moon) that I will be married, with a couple of kids, living in a big house in leafy Berkhamsted, drinking far too much wine at home, and worrying that my husband and I aren’t having enough sex.

After all, isn’t that what most people my age should be doing?

Sometimes, to me, this seems like Nirvana: a feeling of contentment, of living in your own skin, of feeling that you’ve arrived, this is adulthood, and you can bloody well go and book a holiday if it all gets too boring.

The reality of my life is nothing of the sort of course. Sometimes I don’t recognise the reality that is my life. Take last Saturday for example. Whilst most people my age were at home indulging in their very own Nirvanas (drinking too much wine and arguing about not having sex no doubt) I was celebrating Matt Black’s birthday with the Berko Massive at the local after-hours night spot, scaring the teenagers with my dance-moves (I am professionally trained thank you very much) and snogging Matt Black.

Yes I know, but it was always going to happen. You fancy someone, you live in a small town, you both like a drink, and you’re both out drinking together. Add to that having no routine or structure, or limiting factors such as husbands and wives (and therefore not being able to rely on excuses such as, “I’d better go, we’ve got to go and visit the in-laws tomorrow”). Not to mention the inordinate amount of booze we ploughed through, courageously, at the pre-pub birthday BBQ. Plus it was his birthday (Happy Birthday, MB!) and I um… have no excuse.

The fact that neither him nor I have any recollection of snogging is symptomatic of our, sorry, my – I shall not implicate him in this any further – general wayward ways and inability to follow any rules of convention. We only know because afterwards, when MB asked the ‘massive when they’d left, they informed him it was when they noticed we were hunkered down in the corner necking like teenagers. Not that either of us seemed to care that much. Perhaps by one’s mid-thirties, all standards go out of the window and it’s simply one long, slippery slope to old age when you shout at strangers and go to the shops in your dressing down, and don’t give a damn what anyone thinks.

The next day was MB’s actual birthday. Not being a girl, he said he had no need for a week-long celebration, but I was having none of it. Instead, we nursed a pint or two in the pub, and then decided to cook food. I invited Egg (and Fergus) and Chardonnay over for a birthday dinner. This all seemed totally unremarkable until I looked about me; at the candle-lit meal I was eating with my ex-turned-friend, my ex-turned-friends’s-friend, my father-of-child-turned-friend and my son, and realised how much I was enjoying myself. Because the fact is, I may yearn for the ‘normal’ thing; the large house, the husband, the domestic binge drinking and the arguments about sex, but maybe, just maybe I am not cut out for the ‘normal’ thing after all and should be getting on living in the now, in the life I do have, rather than the fantasy one I lust after - the one that may very well bore me rigid.

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