Elaboration

Alright then, birthday weekend.


Saturday was Bristol Zoo. My family came in the car to pick me and Sarah up, and off we went. We listened to songs from the 60s on the way there.

It had been a while since I'd been to a zoo, and I'd forgotten how much fun they could be. We saw lions and monkeys and penguins and seals and flamingoes and meerkats and lemurs and prarie dogs and snakes and pufferfish and gorillas and red pandas and chicken frogs and monitor lizards and bird-eating spiders and a butterfly landed on my leg and Sarah took many many photos, which I imagine will go up on Facebook as soon as we pay the Virgin bill and they give us our internet back.

On the way back from Bristol, we hit up Penylan library and took out a couple of DVDs to watch (after much deliberation and debate). That evening we watched Burlesque, featuring Cher and Christina Aguilera who were okay but very much upstaged by Stanley Tucci (a.k.a. the dad from Easy A). We paused the film halfway through to enjoy my pre-birthday cheesecake; apparently I would be getting my actual birthday cake from another source. Sarah and my mum knew something that I didn't.


So yesterday was my actual birthday and, even though I'm 20 now, I feel pretty much the same as I did when I was a teenager. Hopefully that should allay any of your fears if you're still 19 (I wish I were still 19; my childhood is over. I can't believe I'll never be young again!)

There were many presents, including Liverpool shirts, the Extras boxset, albums by PJ Harvey, Bon Iver, Radiohead, and R.E.M. (the latter on vinyl), all 6 Scott Pilgrim books in a nifty boxset with a poster, some awesome old man pyjamas (exactly my style), a coat that makes me feel like I'm in the Editors, and of course a clarinet, which Tom is going to show me how to play, maybe.

On to the birthday meal. Harvester has kind of lost its novelty, and the folks at TGI's have a nasty habit of singing to you on your birthday, so, at Sarah's recommendation, we decided to try something new and headed to Frankie & Benny's on Newport Road. It was very nice indeed; I had a cajun chicken pasta bake, followed by this insane cookie thing with ice cream and berries.

Frankie & Benny's left us very very full, but rather than go home and collapse we opted to go to Pets At Home and look at the fuzzy animals. It was like Bristol Zoo all over again - they even had pufferfish! Sarah and I were rather taken with the Degus, but decided that a student house was probably no environment for a little mouse, and decided to leave the pets for another day.

Back home, we watched The Other Guys (the other fim from the library) before heading back to Tewkesbury Place to set up for the evening.

There was to be no huge house rave, just a few people gathering in a place to play Mario Party 2 and say how much they like me. But we had a problem - we had lost the Mario Party cartridge.

Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. We enlisted the help of Mark and Josh (who arrived before anyone else) and turned the hunt into a party game of sorts, scouring the living room and sifting through the debris in Ciffey's room in search of that game. But it was nowhere to be seen; my brother's friend Jacob had lent us Mario Party 1 as a contingency plan, but dammit, that just wasn't the same.


So spirits were greatly lifted when I summoned up some previously untapped might to lift one of the sofas up and Josh, peeking underneath, cried out that he had spotted it. Success!

Tom and Jen and Tim and Anna soon joined the party, and pretty soon I had accrued a LOT of cake. Mark had brought a chocolate birthday cake from his work, and Jen had made piles and piles and piles of little fairy cake things. Having spoken to my mum today, she was at least partially in on this plan, and had relinquished the cheesecake a day early so as not to overwhelm me on the big day.

We played couples' Mario Party Drinking Game for a while - one person playing, one drinking - but eventually Anna left, Tim was left on his own, and the game descended into chaos. So we abandoned it and just sat around chatting. And singing, and rapping - I got hold of Pete's guitar and Tom and I did a rendition or two of all our most popular hits.

And that brings us just about up to present. Nobody really stayed over (well, Sarah and Tom and Jen did, obviously, but they would have done anyway) but it still had a bit of a slumber party feel to it, mostly thanks to the commitment of people like Tim and Josh who had brought pyjamas to change into even though they would have to change back out of them again before the night was over. The whole weekend, in fact, was excellent times, and in all seriousness, I'm not worried about the passing of my teenagerdom. I never acted much like a teenager anyway, and I don't expect to start acting like a proper grown-up now.

Joel.