BIRTHDAY REFLECTIONS

Sometimes people ask me if I like having my birthday on the Twelfth of July, and I ask them if they’d like a dig in the gob…No, no, I do but jest. I know that it brings a lot of sunshine and laughter into many lives that might otherwise be dull and drab. Being born on the Twelfth gives me unique advantages.

It allows me to be a bridge over troubled waters. For example, if I were to run into Ian Óg Paisley, I’d put an arm around his manly shoulders and tell him how I too knew what it was to be mocked, that just as he was kicked out of office unexpectedly and through no fault  – well, not too much fault of his own, so I was ejected from my mother’s womb into  a hostile world of thumping drums and shrill pipes and urinating men.

I’d explain how being born on the Twelfth meant that one minute I was gobbling birthday jelly and ice cream, the next I was rushing outdoors to repulse the Protestant throngs who had gathered at the fence between us and were raining stones down on our good hay-shed.

I’d tell them of the immensely witty men and women who, when they heard I was born on the Twelfth, said quick as a flash “How come they didn’t call you Billy, then?!” Had my birthday not hit the Twelfth jackpot, I’d have gone through life not knowing these many people who put Oscar Wilde to epigrammatic shame.

Above all, I’d have missed out on my first twelve years of life, during which I assumed that the bands that went thundering into Omagh every Twelfth had indeed, as my sisters told me, come out in their uniform and with their massive banners, all in honour of my birthday.

Granted, it came as a severe gunk when my mother took me aside at thirteen and told me that these bands were in fact not for me but for an orange king ( I imagined him at a stall heaped with oranges, a crown on his head) who had defeated in battle a Catholic king called James hundreds of years ago.  How could they, I thought, thump their musical way in honour of a king that’d been in his grave for several centuries and so knew nothing of what they were doing, while I, here and now alive, had a birthday that didn’t get so much as the twang of a Jew’s harp to soothe my birthday ears.

But you gotta take the rough with the smooth. Now I rejoice in my connections with royalty, even if the Catholic one did get a hiding from the Protestant one. Which could have been avoided, of course, if there’d been an Alliance Party back then.