40

author of The Penelopiad, The Myth of
Penelope and Odysseus

My Fortieth Birthday
    ( PART TWO OF TWO )
    The good thing with her asking meant that at least there wasn’t going to be a surprise party for me. If there is one thing that I don’t like it’s a surprise, and she knows it. If you want to know another thing I don’t like, it’s fuss. I can’t be doing with people making a fuss of me. The first time it happened was when I started work. I was on a training scheme at a printing company and the boss bought a cake and called me to the kitchen. As I opened the door, they all sang ‘Happy Birthday’, which must be one of the most boring songs ever written. It follows you right through your life. Why it hasn’t been updated and changed I don’t know. They remade the film Total Recall recently, and that was totally unnecessary as the original was only made in 1990. Get the bloody birthday song redone.
    Anyway, I hated all the bother surrounding my birthday and felt embarrassed. I quickly said ‘cheers’ and took the cake home. My mam then explained to me that I should have cut the cake there and then and shared it out, but staying in the kitchen handing out cake and talking to people I didn’t know was not for me. I think this is why Bob Geldof chucked food parcels out of planes in Africa – it was to avoid the small talk.
    ‘Why should they get my cake?’ I remember thinking.
I wouldn’t mind if I knew all of them, but there were people there from different departments, who I’d never seen in my life, and yet they expected to have some of my cake. My mam
made me take what was left into work the next day. After that experience, I always arranged to be away on holiday when it was my birthday. I also preferred to get fired from a job instead of leaving, as people don’t tend to get you a card and cake or make a fuss when you’ve been booted out.
    In the end Suzanne agreed to make me a chilli and it was well nice, and I didn’t have to share it with any strangers.

    Karl Pilkington, author of The Further Adventures
of an Idiot Abroad

Forty Words Written After Being Asked
to Write Something to Celebrate Canongate’s
Fortieth Birthday
    Terrible timing. The digits my children have has just gone from forty to sixty. You should’ve asked before I turned forty, before Life of Pi , before the Booker, before children. As it is, I don’t have time for forty winks.
    Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi

At Forty
    Your hairdresser will become a close friend. My hairdresser will be me. Our siblings will exist once per fortnight, in chain pubs on dual carriageways. Conversations will shrink. A hedgehog’s heart beats three hundred times a minute, Mum cries at soaps now, the dog is dying. After arguments, you will sleep with
your ankles at my ears. We will discuss the possibility of scuba diving and never go scuba diving. Our weekends will consist of entire crime drama seasons, circles of chorizo, and alternating foot rubs. Our first child will thoroughly research and firmly believe in conspiracy theories regarding Princess Diana and humanoid reptiles. Our second child will eat lip balm. The
family dynamic will be ‘mostly calm, with patches of light
drizzle and the possibility of hurricane-force winds’. Your mum will die and my mum will die. We will be awake late one night and find our second child eating toothpaste on the patio,
quietly talking to the moon, dancing jerkily as though hypnotized. We will not know how to respond. As a family, we will holiday in America. Our first child will punch a dolphin at SeaWorld and claim self-defence. We will sigh. We will take it in turns to gain weight, lose friends, and quit smoking. You will be thirty-nine until the birthday when you tear up and drive, alone, to Alton Towers, to ride the same rollercoaster over and over. We will shrug. Strangers will stay strangers. Our bodies will begin to melt.
    Ben Brooks, author of Grow Up and Lolito

Rioting 40s

    Carol Birch, author of Jamrach’s Menagerie

Brrrr . . .
    How cold is Fairbanks, Alaska? Not cold enough! To make it colder, in 2007 a local man called Jesse Warwick invented
40˚ Below Fairbanks, a hut where you can experience extreme
winters in the middle of summer. There are lots of other
things to do in Fairbanks – the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, a nearby goldmine called Dredge No 8, the Northern Lights – but there’s only one place where you can put on a hired parka and hammer in a nail