David Charters: Do you know who has the same birthday as you?

Apr 8 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE telephone trilled from its perch on the table at the bottom of the stairs with the persistence of a lost child.

“You get it,” called my wife who, with that determined streak found in her sex, was poaching an unfortunate egg in the kitchen.

As the poor chap spun and twitched in the pan, his magnificent yolk rose from the boiling water like a Birkenhead sunrise. In his passion, I briefly imagined the suffering of the early Christian martyrs.

But the phone was still ringing.

It was my eldest sister who, in moments of floating fancy, can sniff jasmine in the gardens on the outer suburbs of Heaven – while still being young enough to build a stout, dry-stone wall around the garden of her cottage in Snowdonia, where she lives with numerous wide-pawed dogs, whose tails swish to the glory of life.

Such wild and heathered places call to my heart.

Anyway, she wanted to know how I was feeling on the evening of my 60th birthday.

“Fine,” I said. “I waddled along to the village post office on my own to collect the form for my bus pass and returned safely. How are you?”

She was also “fine”.

The boy next door and her grand-daughter were in the back garden playing with a toy aeroplane, she said. It was, as we spoke, flying over the roof.

“Gosh,” I said. “How did it get there – was it propelled by an elastic band?”

“No,” she said. “I think it’s more advanced than that.

“It seems to have an engine and its flight patterns are controlled by pushing the buttons on an electronic box in the shrubbery.”

“God bless us,” I said, feeling a little crestfallen.

“I thought it might have been like those aeroplanes they used to give away in packets of cereal when I was a boy. They worked on the same principle as a catapult. You attached one to an elastic band, pulled it back and let it go. Whizzzo!

“In the TV adverts, they seemed capable of inter-galactic trips of a distance and duration far beyond the wildest ambitions of the puny boffins tinkering with rockets down in the USA and Russia.”

Commercial images, though, do not always convey exact meaning. If you were not deft in launching the plane, there was a risk of the elastic band twanging to leave an unpleasant bruise behind the nail on your left thumb, while the cardboard craft fell harmlessly and hopelessly to the ground.

Such experiences deflated my early desire to be the first Briton to skip on the surface of Mars.

There is, of course, the question of whether these hi-tech, remote-controlled toys are more fun than an elastic-powered glider, but that is for another time.

Anyway, after finishing the call with an exchange of jokes and good wishes, I noticed again the red-trimmed bus pass application form on the lounge table.

“Travel Passes for Older People,” it declared in bold letters at the top.

“Hhmm,” I thought, “that idea needs a little more time to settle in”.

Earlier in the day, one of my younger colleagues, whose boyish ears still thrill to the “snap, crackle and pop” of the cereal bowl, was sitting at his desk with what I appraised to be a rather cunning grin curling on his lips.

So I was wary when the question came.

“Do you know who has the same birthday as you?” he asked, winking at a colleague.

Some inner light told me that this was not going to be a person of great distinction – a significant philosopher, a lion of the rugby field, a revered marrow-grower.

My birth had not, for example, coincided with that of the resident poet at the Lower Cleethorpes Royal British Legion.

Computers hummed in the office, their beings not bordered by time. The water machine gulped and the emails bleeped.

“Is it by any chance the Yorkshire Ripper?” I asked.

“That’ll teach them,” I thought, but to my dismay they took the suggestion seriously and started checking their lists.

After some seconds, they discovered that the Ripper was older then me.

However, the name they had in mind was Steven Tyler, the harmonica player with a heavy skiffle combo called Aerosmith. No, I hadn’t heard of him either.

But this brings us back to this business of the bus pass.

Now, it’s OK telling you that I am entitled to one, but it is quite another thing showing it to the driver on the bus. He’ll be a stranger.

I can imagine him looking at the photograph on the card and then at me. I might keep him waiting a little longer.

* LISTEN to David Charters on his podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk