My flatmates and I are not that subtle

It was Holly’s birthday last night (she is the fifth one down) — first birthday in our flat! — and Kieran and Elliot bought her a chocolate sponge cake, which you may see in all its glory, and at first we were going to take her out on the town or something, but she already had plans, so we just had the cake and we had to make the most of it.

The plan was this: We would lure her out into the kitchen, where all the lights would be out except for the flickering candles on the birthday cake, and then she would come in and we would all burst into a merry chorus of “Happy Birthday to You”, and she would be very surprised indeed because she would not have suspected a thing.

So we lit the candles, thus:


And we came up with an ingenious plan (I just wrote “ingenius”, which frankly is a better description of it) to lure her into the kitchen, which is that Sarah would trot round to her room and tell her there was someone at the door for her, and Holly would come out and you remember the rest about the merry chorus and the surprise. We were even clever enough to have Ed ring the doorbell of the flat, in case Holly was listening closely and suspiciously. So off Sarah went, and we lit all the candles and turned out the light and waited, shivering in aaaaaaaantici………

But then Sarah came back out alone and said that Holly said she’d be out in five minutes.

Which we should have expected because Holly takes ages to get ready for anything.

And the candles burned down with surprising rapidity and made little puddles of wax upon the cake, which I still maintain is not a problem because wax is totally edible. Anyway I think it is. I am sure nobody ever took harm from eating wax on a birthday cake, unless the wax or the cake was laced with arsenic or some similarly unpleasant substance. But of course the candles were burning down, and we only had the ones that were on the cake plus four spare ones, and Holly was going to be longer than five minutes, but if we blew out the candles we’d have to relight them when Holly came out, and we would not have enough notice and she’d come out in the middle of us frantically lighting candles, although Kieran was sure he could light them fast enough using this method:


So I said I’d go and wait in the hall and scream loudly when Holly emerged (as if she had frightened me) and distract her by talking to her in the hall for a really long time, and that would give them ample opportunity to prepare everything. I even had the clever idea of standing in my doorway (my room is next to Holly’s) and, when I heard her door opening, pretending that I was just closing my door to go out into the hall and being very surprised indeed to find that she was coming out into the hall at the same moment. Which you must admit is absolute genius.

But the best-laid plans of mice and men, etc, etc, and Holly opened her door and I quickly began to shut mine so that I might turn round to face the hall at just the right moment, but then she did not come out of her door and I foolishly leaned over to see whether it was actually open (it was), and then she came out and I looked dumb and I could not scream and pretend I was frightened but just had to shriek, “Holly!” in accents of joy and then talk to her for a very long time about her friend who was waiting for her but might have left by now and he was tall (”Tall?” said Holly, looking bewildered) and had brown hair (”Asian?” proposed Holly, and I did not agree with her like a good phone psychic but said, Nooooo and caused her even more bewilderment and it was totally unsmooth), and at last I said, “Well, you can just go see if he’s still in there” and fled in embarrassment.

Despite all of these dreadful setbacks, I think the whole thing went off rather well.




And the cake was very tasty. I had it right before my delicious dinner calzone, which spilled a lot all over the oven because we put two calzones on one tray and the tray was definitely not big enough, but it cooked much better than on previous attempts.

Steve looks very cute in his suit, but I did not take a very good picture of him; this one doesn’t include his legs and he looks a bit oddly-shaped and he is making a silly face.


That really has nothing to do with anything. He wasn’t even wearing it the same day as Holly’s birthday. I just wanted to let all of you know that Steve has it in him to be a young urban professional with a briefcase and a yearly subway pass, and you might not have known this about Steve.