I turn 51 on Monday.
My borrowed son turned 20 on Saturday. Close enough to share a cake, a BBQ, a garden, and a sky that went somewhere spectacular just as the light was giving up.
I’d cleared my desk by noon. Paperwork that needed doing, the kind that doesn’t wait for weekends. Then I closed the laptop and didn’t open it again.
He did the BBQ. I did the egg chair under the pear tree, blue raspberry Echo Falls over ice, and a book. That BBQ took an hour to get going and made everything taste like it earned it — built from old bricks, many of them still stamped with the Grimethorpe Colliery mark. My hands were red from the tandoori marinade before we’d even started. You can’t scrub it out. Eventually you stop trying.
The Echo Falls tasted as weird as it looked. Worth the try. The homemade pear wine that came out later was considerably stronger than it had any right to be, and that is all I’m going to say about that.
I bought the cake. Galaxy. Thick chocolate ganache, buried in chocolate drops, sparklers on top. He didn’t know it was coming. Birthday cake is not negotiable. It just isn’t.
We ate too much. We always do.
Someone found the marshmallows. Straight onto the grill — blackened outside, collapsed in the middle, slightly too hot, completely perfect. A ritual nobody planned and nobody questions
Then I looked up.
Pink, then gold, then that particular shade of orange that only happens in June. A crescent moon sitting quietly in a gap between the clouds, just visible, before the light finally died and the night started proper. Same view I’ve looked at my whole life.
I didn’t plan a party. I didn’t book anything. We lit a BBQ on bricks that once built a colliery town, made a cake nobody was expecting, and watched the sky do something it does for free.
That’s nearly 51. That’s enough.