to me! Happy Birthday to me! Ooh, I feel like the Queen today. Not a queen, THE queen! This year I have not one but TWO birthdays – an official birthday which is on 24 November – when I will be Spread the Word’s OFFICIAL Birthday Girl @ their official Birthday party – and today, which is also my actual birthday. Not sure if I’ll get older faster as a result, certainly not wiser though…so much babble and I haven’t even hit the champagne yet. Must be over excitement. It’s funny, I think lots of Virgos are writers – or lots of writers I know are Virgos. Mercury, planet of communication, yes, I have outed myself as a not so secret astrologist. Anyway, still rambling: Patience Agbabi is my Birthday Twin – and Dotun Adebayo and Courttia Newland are on 25 August. So Happy Birthday to all of us! Check Courttia reading at the first Tell Tales II tour, tonight at the Bloomsbury Theatre. www.telltales.co.uk for full details. Short stories and music, cool line up, also including Maggie Gee, Rajeev Balasubramanyam and Heather Imani. I’m off to sunny Spain first thing tomorrow, hasta la proxima chicititos. Back in a week.

I now know how Andrew Motion must have felt on the Golden Jubilee. Madame Jemimska celebrates a big birthday ending in a zero next week and 27 of us are assembling in Ibiza to mark the occasion. My job: to edit the multi-contributor poem we’ve put together. All very lovely – as it should be – but it’s all been a bit of a Hallmark moment.

An excerpt from my bit:
As deep as she’s mellow, as blithe as she’s wise
We give you this poem – your Birthday Surprise!

I think I may have missed my calling.

You know the feeling. You can’t write. You forgot to press save. It’s raining in August, again. Your mum’s poems are better than yours. Time for a picture instead.

Despite having been a founder member of FAG (the Feminist Action Group) and dragging me and my sisters off to Greenham Common in the early 80s Mum now gets the Daily Express just like Nanny and Granddad. It’s the word game, apparently. Mum has subverted it, and uses it as a writing kick start, so that each word she finds in the nine letter anagram has to form part of a poem. It’s night now, but in the morning I am going to give up this pathetic struggle for genetic independence and fulfill my biological destiny.

Meantime, just noticed Not Sudoku has nine letters…

It was dusk
she wiped snot from her snout
and continued to dunk
her donut (American style).
She sunk back into her snood
as if the world would stun her,
took some nuts,
tapped them to see if they were sound.
Her stomach was in knots
and soon the whole place
stunk.

Just moved house and I still haven’t unpacked my books. I won’t settle until we do. There’re no shelves to speak of, maybe the people who lived here didn’t have books. The books I do have out are odd. There’s one called Wordplay: A Curious Dictionary of Language Oddities, which I’d never really looked at before. Now I know that ‘riffraff’ is ‘the common word containing the most repeats of the letter f’. Or one for my mum: oxyphenbutazone (inflammatory drug) – ‘the highest single word score in Scrabble – 1508. It’s addictive in an odd way, I expect I will be compelled to share more. You have been warned.

(Muddleheaded: common word containing the most repeats of the letter d.)