My Birthday – August 14th

It was my birthday yesterday on August the 14th.

I am a birthday person in that I love to celebrate other people’s birthdays more than Cristmas and certainly more than new year, but I don’t like celebrating my own.

This has something to do with with not like being the centre of attention far, far more than not wanting to admit that I am getting older, but it is more than that too.

My wife, Neem, and we have only been maried for five years, insists that I have a party and she is very good at putting one on. I do’t begrudge her the pleasure of doing it or the pleasure that others may derive from attending, but I actually prefer to do what I did for thirty years before meeting Neem and that was to just go out alone on a pub crawl and see what happens.

Those days seem to be behind me now, but I would go out, sit alone in bars where I was not known and not mention that it was my birthday unless it came up in conversation, which it sometimes does.

Anyway, yesterday, in front of ten or fifteen people during the morning phase of the do, the postman arrived with a parcel. People assumed that it was from my family, but Neem and I knew better. In fact, it was from my printers and was two weeks early, but great timing. I opened the box and Neem handed copies of my latest three books around.

Everyone was suitably impressed. That happened several times throughout the day, until one Thai woman, at about 7pm, asked who ‘that lady in the book’ was. Well, I had not put any ‘lady’ in my book, so I looked, but I had no idea.

Between the pages of 122 and 124, where I had planned page 123 to go, was a book of 40 odd pages of poetry entitled ‘The Verse of Life’. I had never heard of the book and did not recognise the photo or the name of the authoress.

It is strange though. That section fits as neatly into my book called ‘Maya – Illusion’ as an interlude used to in the cinema.

I will have to have it removed from future editions of my book, but I am glad that I have four copies containing it too.

Another thing that happened on my birthday was my birthday give-away.

I decided to be magnanimous and give a free ebook copy of ‘The Misconception’ to whomever wanted it for the 24 hours of my birthday. I really pulled the stops out and promo’d it through a few clubs I am in, Twitter, Facebook and a 120-strong readers list of my own.

The result was that 24 people downloaded it and I was one of those! Twenty-four people out of seven billion!

Now, I don’t call that a disaster, because I don’t really see why I should give my work away anyway, but it is very odd that when I have done this give-away thing before,I never told anyone and always had 200-500 takers and this time I really tried and only got twenty-three (or four).

Odd, eh?

See Owen Jones’ personal web site at http://owencerijones.com