You tend to get, and give, plenty of warning about your 40th birthday. Months before it happens, you make sure it's on all your friends' radars. You're looking for sympathy, and way above averagely expensive presents. They're looking for - demanding - an extravagant party. You canvas opinions about venues and menus with more advance warning than a wedding. There's plenty of time for everyone to arrange the billeting of children with grannies and nannies.
When the day comes you are surrounded by your wonderful, generous, pampering friends, who cocoon you in an indulgent cloud of fuss and presents, and share with you a staggering quantity of champagne and hard-kicking cocktails. There's dinner and cake if you can remember to eat it. You dance until dawn. It's all so lovely that even your hangover makes you smile. You are left feeling that life, if not actually deferring to the old cliché, may yet prove surprisingly tolerable for the next decade or so.
It's your 41st birthday they don't warn you about. The quiet, reflective one that nobody remembers. I've just had mine. How is it that I was not flooded with emails, texts and phone calls, saying, 'Just thinking what a wonderful amazing time we were all having this time last year?' Is it possible that my friends were not, like me, replaying in their heads every hilarious and debauched moment of it? Is the date of my birthday not now permanently etched in their brains, or at least their diaries, with a note two days before, to 'send card and present to H'? It seems not.
Forty-one is tough. Worse than that, it's tough without sympathy. The lonely angst of ageing requires solipsistic solutions. Luckily I could, to an extent, see this coming. I knew that if my 41st-birthday weekend was not to be spent wallowing in self-pity, I would need to arrange, in the absence of a life-affirming party, some seriously life-affirming presents. I also knew that, realistically, I would have to give such presents to myself.
And so I ordered myself an orchard. And we spent the weekend planting it. Fifteen little trees - mainly apples, but also gages, plums, cherries, pears - and a quince. The apple varieties have been chosen with great care, after some enthusiastic research at Dorset Apple Day last October. The most gastronomically exciting are probably Ashmead's Kernal, which is explosively crisp and has a sparkling, almost champagne-like tang, and Orleans Reinette, whose light, nutty crunch comes with an amazingly complex flavour that includes hints of honey and citrus and an almost rose-like scent.
The trees are beautiful things, but really still quite tiny - just whippy little saplings. They are smaller, even, than the tree which Basil Fawlty up-rooted to beat his recalcitrant car with in the classic Gourmet Night episode of Fawlty Towers. (Incidentally, though I admit it isn't crystal clear from the script, I now think it very likely that the character of Basil was meant to be 41 - the perfect age for venting one's mid-life, middle- class rage on defenceless Austin Allegros.)
Now that I have my orchard, I'm feeling soothed, and the likelihood of Cleese-like rage is palpably diminishing. Of course I will have to wait a long time - several years - before they produce fruit in any significant quantity. But that's part of the whole psychology of the enterprise. Delayed gratification has never been my thing. But now I have a reason to yearn for, rather than fear, the hastening of age. Because the older I am, the more productive my orchard will be.
Call me a weirdo, but I am already starting to map out my remaining years on the planet in relation to these trees. Every spring, from here on, I see family picnics beneath the canopy of blossom - albeit that for the first few years we'll have to crouch or lie down to be beneath that canopy. By the time my youngest (Freddie, aged two) and his friends are big enough, and naughty enough, to be interested in scrumping, there should be fruit enough to allow for this traditional form of fruity taxation by the young. (Until then I'll have to make the orchard a no-scrump zone for Oscar, six, and Chloe, nine). And by the time I celebrate my fiftieth (which I hope will be right up there with my 40th) I reckon I should be able to eat at least one item of fruit from the orchard on every single day of the year, between the middle of July and Christmas Day (allowing for correct and careful storage of the right apple and pear varieties).
Perhaps one day I will have grandchildren of tree-climbing age, by which time my trees should be big enough to welcome them into their branches. And, if all goes according to plan, I see my aged self, some 40 years from now, swinging in a hammock slung between the Concorde pear and the Stella cherry, waiting for shiny ripe red fruits to drop into my mouth. Perhaps I'll even pass away peacefully in my sleep, before the swaying hammock comes to a complete stop. Less romantically, I suppose I might choke to death on a cherry stone. Either way, I wonder if I'll have the wit to say 'Pip, pip!' just before I croak.
