Here it is – the cake. The cake that my husband bought me. Ha! I am clearly loved after all!

Thank you, dear Patisserie Valerie, for your enthusiastic spewy layers of cream and sponge and sauce and chocolate icing and more layers of soft foam and more sponge finished off with strawberries encased in some slippery jelly and chocolate balls and enormous waves of chocolate sheets. It was not a subtle cake. It was a cake that shouted

HAPPYBIRTHDAYLETSBECOMEENGULFEDINSYNTHETICSUGARDSANDFAKECREAM

and then it did a little dance and then it lay down waiting to die. The children were a bit hesitant. Dare I say that they were actually intimidated by that cake. It was a cake of pre-recession excess. It was an orgy of unfashionable Goldman Sachs-type confectionery greed. And this is what it did to our faces and this is why we have shiny sugar-high druggy eyes:

Actually, the baby has a cakemouth, it is true, but he also has a busted lip from falling off his chair and smacking his face onto the corner of another chair, splitting his lip and then bleeding all over himself and me. He did that on my birthday. We were trying to go out to dinner at L’Autre Pied. The timing was a bit off, really.

And that was also the day the double buggy broke into two pieces on our way home from school when we had stopped to peer over the railings into someone’s basement flat to look at their rabbit called Twitch. Twitch was looking entirely unmoved, as usual, as we all hung over the pointy Victorian railings calling his name in high-pitched baby voices. Twitch just stares into middle distance. Sometimes he chews stuff, to be fair, but mostly he stares and stays perfectly still, except for a bit of name-sake twitching. He is really boring, but we still stop by twice a day and call out to him in the vain hope he will give us some sort of acknowledgement. But anyway, this day, the wheels just fell away in an almost Biblical fashion and so we had to get home by angling the front wheels into the air. I was pretty cranky and irrational (sample dialogue “It’s my BIRTHDAY! Can’t you boys stop whining and hassling me? Now the wheels have come off, and I think it was really YOUR FAULT! Because you were ANNOYING! And now I have to push this thing home halfway up in the air! IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!” etc etc in similar illogical and quite mean fashion.)

And this was on the back of a terrible embarrassing supermarket tantrum from Casper which ended up with us walking aimlessly in Hyde Park while kind strangers offered to help me with my screaming hysterical child. It was because I went the wrong way home, apparently. Finally a lady came over with an enormous terrier who sniffed Casper’s face and froze him with terror and stopped his screaming – and prevented him from saying anything at all for about 20 minutes. He finally croaked out a little, wounded, sad, and whispered explanation:

“That big doggy scared me, mummy.”

Top tip: If your kid goes publicly mental, frighten him or her with a huge breathy canine! It is waaay better than squeezing their upper arms.  

And in other birthday news, I got a lovely lotus necklace, a bag for long toiletry items, a Diptyque candle in Rose, a Kate Sylvester tee shirt, tickets to Marrakesh, chocolate, cards, lunch at The Providores, some free babysitting, and I am yet to go and buy myself Chanel’s Peridot. Not too shabby, all in all. Here is me (inexplicably smirking) in my new shirt about to drown myself in my cake’o’excess:

And that, as they say, is a wrap.