Another year older, and deeper in debt

This will be the last year I can count myself among the twenty-something bloggers -- so perhaps I should start looking for a 30-something community instead.  I turned 29 this week and once again have to stop and take stock of my life.

I can't remember how I celebrated my 19th birthday now, except that I was in my first year at university, in Derby.  Did I invite friends to come and see me, and were they too busy?  Did I visit my parents back home?  It's all a mystery to me now.  I guess it wasn't that spectacular.

29 was much better.  In a less than surprising turn of events, I invited friends from home to join me for a meal out locally -- with the idea that I could have a separate celebration in London for people I knew there, making it easy for everyone.  Friends at home didn't have to go to London, and people in London didn't have to trek out to the suburbs.  Except it didn't quite work out that way, and in the end all my friends at home except one -- and, of course, the girl -- couldn't or wouldn't come, so I ended up cancelling my meal out and instead ordering Chinese takeaway and watching a dvd.  I would pretty much live on Chinese takeout if I could get away with it.

On my birthday itself, the girl gave me what could be possibly one of the best gifts ever -- a week-long holiday in Barcelona, later this year when it's warmer.  And she didn't just give me a print-out of the booking confirmation page, she made a kind of flip-book to read that gave me little bits of info on each page to keep me guessing until the end.  We then headed into London to do what we had planned for last year, until the snow ruined everything -- which was visit the London Planetarium.

Except there is no London Planetarium any more, and hasn't been for years, it seems.  Now the only one is at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which was lucky because Greenwich is one of my favourite places to be, and so as well as Planetarium show we got to look round the museum of the Royal Observatory and learn all sorts of cool things about space.  I'm a big nerd about space, and for way longer than was really appropriate still had glow in the dark stars on my walls and ceiling.

This weekend is drinks in London with friends old and new, in my favourite bar in the world -- Kick, in Shoreditch.