So my surprise fortieth birthday was a tremendous affair and shame on you for not being there if you weren’t and double shame on you if you were. Anyway this isn’t facebook so there are no hilarious photos of me in a hat and besides which there were way too many of you present to make any meaningful fatuous or sarcastic comments about the event. What I do offer instead is the transcript of a  speech that I had planned to deliver. I had hotly anticipated a chorus of “Speech Speech Speech” after I had successfully wheezed over my forty candles. Adjusting myself amongst the applause and the false jeopardy of my shyness I would then deliver my startlingly articulate and witty riposte. Sadly, most people just looked on slightly scared and further intimidated by an oversize and thermonuclear Jelly and the speech remained locked in my throat. But seeing you asked heres the speech:

Thank you, thank you and  thank you. How utterly splendid that you are all here today to share in my most recent humiliation. You are all so very kind. And Thank you especially to Candice my beautiful wife, the Cash Converter, and my very own Bag for Life, without whom today would have only have been more affordable.

I would also like to say a special thank you to my poor mother who pushed out this bundle of joy that now stands trembling before you. Forty years ago she gave me the gift of life. Little wonder that this year she opted to give socks instead.

I would like also to thank my father. However that current impostor would seem to have done little other than absently  spill his  Y oh Y oh Y  chromosone.

Any way, forty years ago I came into this world screaming, bewildered and shitting my self.  And, un-remarkably nothing much has changed.

Now it isn’t my fault that I was born to this world with ignorance pre-installed or that I seem destined to leave it with a hard drive  of  oportunities to purchase viagra at low low prices. But it probably is my fault that I  have tried to construct a Giant Hadron Collider in my own mind using only drugs and some sticky backed plastic.

Don’t get me wrong. I am truly amazed and humbled by this  gift of life, but knowing what I know now I would quite happily settle for the cash alternative.

So there we go. Thanks again for coming to rubberneck at my life but would you now kindly leave via the nearest available exit .

But before we disperse let us look to some of our greatest thinkers for guidance along the way.

Beckett warned that “we are born astride a grave ” and that “the Light shines but a moment then darkness once more”  Socrates  tempted purpose in “Nosce te ipsum” – “know Thyself”. But brilliantly it was Shakira who said ” Lucky that my breasts Are small and humble -  so you don’t confuse them – with mountains”  What we take from all this I am as yet unsure – but I genuinely and passionately trust that each of  you will  be present should any one of us ever stumble upon anything meaningful.