Please click the photo above to play the daily videoAnita's birthday, and it began, as the good ones do, with someone else doing the work. A friend arrived with breakfast — unannounced in the nicest sense, the sort of gesture that can't be reciprocated so much as passed along later. There's real generosity in feeding someone on their birthday before the day has had a chance to make demands of them. The house smelled like a small occasion by half past eight.
Then I went to work, as usual, which is the unromantic part of birthdays that fall on weekdays. The world declines to observe them. I left her surrounded by the early wave of gifts and made my way in with the mild guilt of a man who knows the better party is happening in his absence.
By all accounts the gifts kept coming. Gifts galore, in fact — the sort of steady arrival that turns a living room into a modest depot by mid-afternoon. She has a gift for being loved, Anita, and days like this simply make the evidence visible. I got updates throughout, each one photographed with the enthusiasm of someone genuinely surprised, which after all these years I still find rather lovely.
The afternoon turned wet. Rain, properly, for hours — the kind that arrives without negotiation and settles in, turning the roads into something to be endured rather than driven. I'd braced myself for a long crawl home and, against all reasonable expectation, got away early and beat the worst of it. Small mercies, and on a birthday, mercies count double.
Dinner was at Anjum, up at KLCC. And here I must be honest, because a diary that only records the good bits isn't worth keeping: it was overrated. Not bad — nothing arrived that offended anyone — but it had that particular quality of a place trading rather more on its address than on its kitchen. Middle Eastern flavours, all correctly assembled, none of them insisting on themselves. You find yourself saying "this is nice" in the tone people use when they mean "this is fine."
The view, though. The view was tremendous. The towers doing their nightly performance, the park below all lit up and green, the whole city arranging itself obligingly outside the window. There's a reason the room is designed to face outward. I'd go back for the view and eat beforehand, which I appreciate is not the review the restaurant is hoping for.
But the company was the point, and the company was excellent. We stayed on longer than we meant to, which is my favourite kind of staying on.
There was a slight drizzle when we came out, barely worth the name, and it had given up by the time we reached the car. The afternoon's downpour had left the air washed and cool, that brief window when the city smells clean.
Home, and we chilled until late. No agenda, no winding-down ritual, just a room with the two of us in it and no particular reason to end the day.
A good birthday. She earned it.