The case for banning the birthday

Cancel all birthdays. Australia’s, the Queen’s, the Year’s and yours.

By banishing birthdays we’ll immediately feel younger. Image: iStock

John Howard and I have always been close, at least when it comes to birthdays. We were both born in July, just a few days apart in 1939. Just apart enough to give us different astrological IDs – me a Cancer, he a Leo. Thus saving the ancient pseudo-science considerable embarrassment. And who wants Cancer as his/her sign? It’s more of a death sentence. “Jimmy Dancer” in rhyming slang, the cosmic crab all too often sends one tap-dancing to an early demise – although I speak as a cancer survivor.

But there’s one thing that inevitably leads to death: the incurable birthday. Symbolised by the cake with its fatal fossil-fuel candles. As I’ve grown older I’ve shunned the birthday cake. The sugary icing can trigger a diabetic debacle while the candles add to global emissions. Particularly in the case of John Howard and me as fellow octogenarians. Yes, it’s been a while since John was a Young Liberal. Appropriately candlelit cakes would be illegal during bushfire season and neither John nor I have enough puff to blow out all that candlepower. We’d have to get one of those infernal leaf-blower things.

Which is another reason I forget people’s birthdays. I recently had to send an apologetic email to youngest daughter Aurora, who lives in Paris doing left-wing things, for forgetting hers. As I pointed out, this annual lapse of memory – and it applies to the birthdays of all four daughters – derives from my desperation to forget my birthday. A classic case of repressed memory.

I do not wish to have a birthday, and I encourage everyone to forget mine – the birthday as well as the lit sponge, which represents a funeral pyre. Yet the only birthday I want is the next one. And the next. Etcetera. Ad nauseam. Birthdays that rage against Dylan Thomas’s “dying of the light”.

Which brings us to Happy Birthday, the most tuneless of dirges with its woeful lyrics. It makes Handel’s Death March sound chirpy. There’s nothing remotely happy about Happy Birthday, the only song that’s even more miserable than God Save the Queen. I suspect the same composer wrote both of them having forgotten to take his anti-depressants. Along with Auld Lang Syne, that heartbreaking woe-is-us song sung on the birthdays of actual years.

I defy anyone to hear Happy Birthday to You, God Save the Queen and Auld Lang Syne without wanting to phone Philip Nitschke. And who is this old Lang Syne? Is he related to old Lang Hancock? (And I should point out that HM doesn’t seem to like her cake and candles either – celebrating her Queen’s Birthday on the wrong day.)

Birthday, deathday. Let me commend a little song from an early Disney version of Alice in Wonderland: “A very merry unbirthday to you.” Much better, and appropriate to the other 364 days of the year.

To add to the confusion, the Chinese calculate age from the time of conception – a bit like the anti-abortionists in the Roman Catholic Church. And racehorses all have their birthdays on the same day. As does Australia Day, though that birthday is increasingly contested by ungrateful First Nations folk.

Hence my idea, launched this very day in 2021, to cancel all birthdays. Australia’s, the Queen’s, the Year’s and yours. By banishing birthdays we’ll immediately feel younger. Don’t worry – you could still get presents, but on a less bureaucratised basis.