My adamant insistence that I was going to spend my birthday in bed- first asleep until mid afternoon, then sulking under the covers with wine and birthday cake until it ended was ignored and overridden, when the first text message came through at half seven this morning. Despite valiant attempts to get back to sleep, the little beeping noise my phone makes every ten minutes when I have a message/ missed call meant I had to get up and find it- which took a good twenty minutes.
By which time I was well and truly awake, but still doing a good job of ignoring that I'm now officially a, well, a...

A grown up. I believe that's the correct terminology here.

Good lord, but twenty is old. It feels it, anyway- although you wouldn't know that by the way I'm scoffing my birthday cake; it has a poisonous shade of green icing with different sponge sections, shaped like a childs drawing of a caterpillar.

Of all my childhood obsessions- and those include the Famous Five, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sleeping Beauty- there's one I haven't grown completely out of, and that's Peter Pan. Of course! I had to pick the most potentially ruinous of the bunch.

I don't seem to be bitching to the right people- and not least because all of my friends (except the odd undesirable) have abandoned me in favour of the Carling festival. So who did I choose to bitch to first? With my usual precision for this kind of thing, I chose the lovely person who sent me that message at half past seven this morning- namely, Ca.
I sent her one back, and got a reply- "wait until you're forty, thats fucking weird and all babe".

Fair point.

In desperation- if I have to be awake for the whole of my birthday I might as well have some company, after all- I even asked my mother to take the day off work but to no avail. My baby brother's at his friends' house, and my little sister has gone pony riding for the day- my mother owning a small glue pot of the beasties notwithstanding, she still prefers to pay to ride other peoples. So I have the house to myself, am bingeing on cake and anime, wearing my purple polka dot pyjamas, fluffy slippers with a flower on them and my oldest brothers dressing gown- who says I can't have good time by myself? It turns out lying is not the most fun a girl can have with her clothes on. Well, not only.

Imogen:* x