It's not like when you're 4 and you know exactly what you want your birthday cake to look like, or when you're 9 and you organise a fancy dress party with your cousin because you have a dress that makes your handcrafted wand look perfect, and she has the perfect magician's top hat… it's different now. But still, it's your birthday, so you try to find some magic.
At the entrance, some advice from George Bernard Shaw on birthdays… I'm afraid I disagree with you here, dear GB…
but ah! your writing shed…
Built around a central steep-pole frame, so Shaw could follow the arc of the sun's rays, it was dubbed 'London' by its bearded owner - unwanted visitors were kept away by being told he was 'visiting the capital'… we were therefore surprised to find a telephone above the typewriter, but suspected that was in lieu of a dinner gong - his wife, Charlotte, needing some way of calling her husband in from the land of words. In keeping with the irony of Shaw's instructions to a birthday girl, his house, a paean to Edwardian Arts-and-Crafts days, was closed for modern 'electricals', but the gardens were open and my friends had brought a picnic…
Across from Shaw, the Church of St Lawrence, somewhat newly ruined, and then twist through three kissing gates, take a selfie with sheep, and you arrive at the Apollonian influenced Greek revival church, built at the request of Sir Lionel Lyde, who decreed that 'what the church united in life, it should keep separate in death'. Interesting marriages, the Lydes and the Shaws!
The weather held, the sheep did not leap over the fence to knock the offending selfie-taker, my friends sang 'happy birthday' in church - where it sounded hallowed and melodious - and I even discovered a plaque commemorating a Lieut. Colonel Monier Williams, of the Honourable East India Company's Service, who was Surveyor General of Bombay; also of his son Alfred, ensign in the Grenadier Regiment Bombay Infantry, who fell, at 19, gallantly leading the Storm of The Pass of Nufoosk - a piece of Indian/British history I had never heard of. So I suppose you don't need to be 4 or 9 to enjoy your birthday - you just need the right friends.
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