Cakes and literary references

Today's my birthday and this is the cake that Michelle McGrane has made to celebrate it. I'm beyond touched.

(And if you don't pick up the literary reference, click here. You know the next step.)

Happy birthday, dear blog

I shouldn't get too sentimental about this, but today is my blog's second birthday. It's been an eventful two years for me, with publications and so on, and my blog's been beside me all the way, making useful suggestions, cheering me up when I'm down, calming me down when I'm a little too up. It's made me laugh more than once, and cry as well. It's introduced me to many new friends, and reunited me with old ones (I know, Nigel, I'm mortified, be patient a little longer), and I'm grateful for that. It hasn't always been sensible, or wise, but you expect the very young to embarrass themselves, and their parents, occasionally. So let's wish it more of the same, and more of whatever more there is.

(It isn't great but this is the only cake I could find for a second birthday. Apart from one with boobs, which just didn't feel right, somehow.)

Returns

I'm off to England for the weekend to celebrate my mother's 92nd birthday.

See you next week.

Happy birthday to whole universe! And me! (Two days late)

Tom Raworth has just reminded me that, according to Archbishop James Ussher, I share my birthday with Heaven and Earth, created on 23 October 4004 BC.

Other people whose birthdays coincide with mine and the entire caboodle include Diana Dors, 'Weird' Al Jankovic and Ned Rorem. For a complete list (and further proof that astrology is a distinctly inexact, er, science) click here.