It was my thirty-fifth birthday last week. “The days of our years are three-score and ten,” says Psalm 90:10, so I’m half-way there now. It was a lovely day I spent with my family. After a relaxing morning, we went for a walk at Wollaton Park. Rafe and I climbed a tree in the gardens. It is a tree that is beyond my power to name accurately. Its trunk is unidentifiable and its limbs are thick and entangled around one another in strange inversions and angles. I was able to climb quite high and sit down upon a natural platform. I could see over the canopy that surrounds the area and down to the large lake that marks the boundary at the edge of the grounds. Rafe was pretty impressed with that and kept exclaiming, “Wow, Daddy, how have you got all the way up there?” In the evening, we had a couple over who are friends of ours. It was extremely pleasant with lots of laughs. It reminded of how I have become far less sociable than I used to be over the last two years. It would have been very normal to think through who we might invite over or what social event we might arrange but now it rarely even occurs to me to think in that way. Socialising is a habit, I suppose. Anyway, that’s how I like my birthdays to be. If I try and do anything more significant, I inevitably end up being distracted by the pressure to have a good time and end up in some kind of existential crisis.
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