Turning leaves

It’s my birthday in exactly one week. In seven days time I’ll be turning twenty-six. (I wonder why we say ‘turning’ instead of ‘getting to’ or ‘becoming’. Turning reminds me of people turning in their graves.) When I was younger, well, maybe 13 or 14, I used to imagine what life would be like when I ‘grew up’, and I would visually see a kind of ladder with each year as a rung, and there would be all kinds of pictures of things sitting on the rungs. Like for 23 I’d have a cool job wearing grey pinstripes and tying my hair back in a slick professional style. On rung 25 I would imagine me being married, and at 30 there’d be like three kids and at 32 holidays in Australia and a big house. How little reality there is when you’re 13!

Anyway, the purpose of this blog was to say that if any of you gorgeous people were in any way thinking of buying me a birthday present (and I really don’t expect any at all, and if you've just clicked 'next blog' then you really won't be) then please, please, please could you either:

Give the money to the poor or
Get a book token?

I know homeless people might spend your hard-earned cash on drugs, and book tokens are boring and disappointingly difficult to wrap up nicely, but all I would like in the whole world is like half of Foyles, or Borders, or that cool bookshop called Pan on the Fulham Road that stacks its books really crazily in piles like cry out to be knocked over like dominoes. There’s a list in my head of stuff I want to read, and it’s getting longer and longer. Thanks for reading. Reading for thanks.