After the age of 30, I lost interest in celebrating my birthday. These anniversaries seemed to come faster and faster until I had barely recovered from the shock of the last before I was yet another year older and I was being given another selection of presents in which the intention of the donors carried increasing doses of irony.
So, on my 36th birthday, I was playing with Not With My Sister in Flatline, the legendary lost rock bar in the Bosphorus paradise of Ortaköy. We had set up and were heading down to the shore to get something to eat before we started playing. My girlfriend turned up and asked, in that way that girlfriends do, whether I had told everyone that it was my birthday today. I hadn’t.
When we got back to the bar, I was shepherded into the back room which, at the time, was a tattoo parlour operated by a couple of friendly and heavily-inked blokes. The drummer’s girlfriend brought in a cake with fewer than 36 candles burning. We did the usual ceremony, then I handed out slices of cakes to musicians, tattoo artists and illustrated people.
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