Birthday Suit

It is Mark’s birthday.

It has not been a terrifically exciting birthday, as birthdays go, but nevertheless it has been quietly satisfactory.

You will be pleased to hear that his sore head is almost completely better, at least unless you pat him on it. Obviously I am resisting the impulse to do this. It is, after all, his birthday.

He has had three birthday cards, a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, which he likes, and some chocolate, which we ate in bed with our coffee this morning.

This seemed very decadent.

We considered things to do for his birthday over the coffee-and-chocolate.

Our birthdays are a couple of weeks apart. Mark’s is at midsummer, and mine is on the middle day of the year. Usually, since they are so close together, we do not buy presents but go out on some day between the two and eat and drink too much.

As it happens we will be going out in a couple of weeks anyway. It is Lucy’s school summer ball a few days after my birthday, and we are fully expecting to eat and drink too much then.

We remembered this morning that the thing Mark has said that he really wants is a new jacket.

He needs a new tweed jacket.

Jackets are important things when you are trying to look as though you are not an impoverished oik. Every single daddy at the children’s schools wears a tweed jacket. You cannot possibly turn up to educational events without one. Even the boys must wear them. Learning to put up with an itchy tweed collar is essential training for joining the middle classes.

Mark likes to wear a tweed jacket in any case, and he has got two. One is a smart one, for going to school or out to dinner or to the theatre, and the other one is his taxi one. His taxi one used to be his smart one once, but it was a long time ago.

Since those heady days it has had a lot of adventures. It has travelled about all over the place, and I patched it when it started to become a little frail and travel-weary about the elbows.

After that I patched it again, and then, as it got thinner, again and again. I patched it with corduroy, and then with leather.

Eventually holes began to appear in the shoulders, and in the forearms, and even in the patches.

It has become that tragedy of a garment, the sort that is not even fit to be worn for listening to intoxicated abuse in a taxi.

In fact his smart one, although better, is not a huge improvement. It gets worn for everything that is not driving a taxi, and there has been quite a lot of that. It has become worn at the elbows, and frayed around the collar, and is no longer the sort of item that might be thoughtfully selected by a snappily-dressed middle class daddy.

We thought today that a good birthday present would not be a night of blissful overindulgence in the pleasures of the table, but probably a new jacket instead. Then his Best Jacket could become his Taxi Jacket, and his Taxi Jacket could be demoted to the shed. 

Mark thinks this is sad. I invite you to look at the picture.

We looked online at the sort of tweed jackets that we know will fit Mark. This is not all of them, because he has got long arms and a long back.

There were some beautiful ones, in sage-coloured tweed, with silky linings in blue and red and maroon and gold.

We could not afford any of them.

We closed the computer and considered this.

I said that I would explore the mighty Internet and see if I could find the same jacket in somebody’s bargain basement sale or eBay listing. This would not solve the problem, but might reduce it a bit.

We considered it a bit longer.

Then Mark had a brainwave.

When we got up he took the dogs up to the farm and began to sort through his not-very-useful-yet-but-maybe-one-day collection of scrap metal.

He spent the whole day doing this.

By the time he had finished he had a very lot of aluminium, some copper, and an assortment of gearboxes and dead engines. There was more than enough to fill the back of his taxi, I do not know where on earth it all comes from. He said that he had stripped the tyres from nineteen alloy wheels. I do not know why he had got nineteen alloy wheels. He is not allowed to investigate or raid other people’s skips, but I know that he does it when he is by himself and thinks that I will not find out.

There must be some gypsy in his bloodline somewhere. 

He did not bring it home, because it had got late and we had got to go to work, but tomorrow morning he is going to load it all up and take it to the scrap merchant in Lancaster. We do not know how much it will all be worth, but it will be a jolly good start on a new smart jacket.

In the meantime I had found the very same jacket from a gun seller on eBay. It was in the right size, brand new, but sixty pounds cheaper.

What was more, I spoke to Number Two  Daughter, who had been wondering what he might like for his birthday, and she sent an instant contribution from Australia, oh the happiness of modern banking.

Between us all we are going to be able to manage it.

He is going to be able to look middle class after all.

We had better not tell anybody how we have done it.

The title of this should be Birthday Jacket really, but obviously Birthday Suit was funnier.

I expect you are rolling in the aisles.