Greg said, “What do you want to do for your 60th?” I looked at him as though he had gone gaga. He looked back at me as though I had gone gaga. I was about to turn 59. My 60th was a year away. I hadn’t given it a thought. I was about to turn 60, he claimed, on September 13 this year, which was a little over a month away. It is true that I have never been good at maths, or dates. But I do know how old I am. No, I don’t. I am about to turn 60. How disappointing. I want to be turning 65 so that I can get on the pension. I want one of Winston Peters’ SuperGold cards, which might entitle me to ride the toy railway round and round Masterton’s Henley Lake Park free of charge. Until eternity, or death. Whichever comes first.
I have had big-bang birthday parties. My 20th was held in a lovely rented Grey Lynn Arts and Crafts house. I wore a sleeveless black sheath dress à la Audrey Hepburn (not very Audrey Hepburn, but one can be deluded when one is 20) made by my friend Deb. I had black kitten-heeled 1940s winklepickers and long jade earrings, long lost and long lamented. Some pseud spent the night standing up quietly reading Camus – or possibly Proust. Was there food? Who knows? Nobody cared.
For my 21st, I threw a masked party at the Pink House in Grafton, a notorious party palace of dubious grotty charm, where I lived with an assortment of weirdos. One, an artist, kept ferrets in his bedroom. A notice on his bedroom door read: “Ferts inside. Do not enter.” After I complained about the ferrets – I had cats – he took to tacking up enormous paintings of evil eyes around the house. The ferrets, inevitably, exited, never to be seen again.
Another flatmate was a cook at a Mexican restaurant. The entire house smelled of corn chips and refried beans. He had a girlfriend, Sexy Sally, who walked about naked.
To that party I wore a cat’s mask, made by Rachel, who lived in the bedroom across the hall from me, and drank vodka for breakfast. The mask was beautiful: glitter-splashed with spiky ears. I wore it with a 1950s frock in dark green satin and a stiffened, pouffy skirt. I had a spiked, gelled-up, punky hairdo.
I had a big bash for my 40th in a dear little house in Balmoral. It was what passed for a civilised affair. Until somebody fell through a rotten board on the deck during some deeply embarrassingly middle-aged pogo-ing to Stiff Little Fingers’ Barbed Wire Love. I wore a Marilyn Sainty wraparound kimono top embroidered with peonies. And high, high, high flapper-style black suede heels.
Then I am at 50. We are living in a posher suburb, in a bigger house. Let’s have a really big bash. I spend a week cooking: stuffed mustard and rosemary fillets of beef, baby spud salads with capers and handmade aioli.
There are salads of posh lettuce with shavings of posh parmesan, fancy tarts, trays of artisan sausages. I ordered cupcakes from some ruinously trendy Ponsonby baker.
I wore an old pair of jeans and shoes that cost $300 from some posh shop and a chiffon Workshop blouse that probably cost about the same. It was all very civilised. We were by now all grown-ups. My mad, lovely uncle, after too much plonk, was saved from falling backwards from a windowseat out of some bifold windows and going plonk 6m below.
All of yesterday’s parties. All marvellously mad and marvellous fun. What would I like to do for my 60th? Cook a chook. Read a book. I would like that my sheep, Elizabeth Jane, gives me a healthy ewe lamb or two. And that the rain stops. I will be wearing sheep-chewed sweatpants, a puffer jacket, filthy gumboots, and lashings of mud. If the pots of tulips flower, that would be enough, I think. I will make cupcakes.
