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This was J's birthday. As always, I concocted a rather messy looking but very chocolatey cake with plenty of frosting. This year she chose peanut butter frosting, which is basically butter icing with peanut butter combined with the butter before the icing sugar is beaten in, and with the addition of some double cream, which one is supposed to add at the end but which I find indispensable to loosen the mix enough to add all the sugar. It's rather too sweet for my taste but very nice nonetheless. As always, I was astonished that she can already be this old - it feels like last year that she reached thirty and not much longer since her mid twenties. When I was thirty-three, she was already three and, after our small-scale battle with the local authority, was attending the regional school for deaf children in the mornings. I was teaching languages full-time and paying a mortgage on a seventies semi, and we had recently taken J to Paris for the first time. She loved going up the Eiffel Tower in the lift - "uck" was one of her first intelligible words, and associated with many of her favourite activities, especially being picked up and cuddled, but anything up was good, and the Eiffel Tower was the biggest to date. She also loved the colourful fountains outside the Centre Pompidou and seeing the children playing around them.

It was a fairly low-key birthday, as they have been for the past four years, but she enjoyed her massage with S and giggled with her over Bridget Jones over lunch. We ate cake together, then later P made pizza and J and I enjoyed the exuberance of Mamma Mia. She has some new films to look forward too, including the latest Hunger Games DVD, but this was a day for something fun and frothy.