The Most Beautiful Candles

There was to be one more surprise. As we sat talking things through, the quiet and unassuming figure of Martinch appeared on the stage half naked, with the phrase “Happy Birthday” emblazoned across his chest. Tomorrow was Jonathans’ birthday, and they had planned something special for him. I’m not sure I can do justice to the show that followed other than to say it involved our beautiful hosts decked in tassels, loud tunes, volumes of combustible liquid, and clouds of fire. It was beautiful in so many ways. As it drew to a close, I leaned over to Jonathan and said “As long as you live, you will never have such beautiful birthday candles”. Jonathan, being the master of the moment took the opportunity for a quick speech, which went something like this. “Thank you, I am deeply honored. As long as I live, I don’t think I will ever have such beautiful birthday candles”. He then turned to me and winked, as I now found myself laughing at my own joke. Afterwards he said to me that he figured I wouldn’t mind him stealing my line. How could I? He’d taken what was meant as a simple, if honest joke and turned it into what was a beautiful and just compliment. The big nosed thieving …clown.

There were then huge numbers of photo’s as everyone had their picture taken with everyone else, and one of the best group photo’s I’ve seen for a long time that started off very sensibly, and ended up as everyone in a huge pile on the floor. We then proceeded to drink the night away and I was introduced to B52’s, a combination of coffee liqueur, cream, absinthe, fire, and a straw.

I managed to time it perfectly so that just as Jonathan was ready to call it a night and head out of there, I’d just acquired a drink. Given that I didn’t have a clue how to get from the club to the flat, I figured I should probably make sure I got a lift, so he left to give Ed and Ieva a lift and said he’d stop back in on the way back to pick me up.

I’m so glad I did stay that little bit longer, or amongst other things, I’d have missed out on the ‘normalcy’ conversation. It started off with someone asking if we thought they were a freak (“well duh! join the circus”), and ended up something like ….. In an insane world, there’s nothing sane about being normal, or to add a different dimension to the same subject, if you ever meet anyone you think is normal, you very probably don’t know them well enough. We could suggest that anyone differing from 50% of society are not normal. We’d then have to decide which 50%, and accept that if only half of society are normal, it’s just as normal to be abnormal as it is to be normal. The most normal person, being so exceptionally normal, that they are more normal than everyone else, could by definition be defined as unique, and therefore a freak. It’s probably not that normal to wax lyrical on this subject of normality but maybe whilst it’s the things that make us the same that keep us together, we should treasure each others uniqueness. Anyone who wants to be the same as everyone else is crazy. Anyone who tries to be unique for the sake of it is, well, probably no different to anyone else, as we all value our own identity in some subtle way. It was late, we were drunk.

I finally managed to time it perfectly by getting another round about a minute before Jonathan came back, so we then had to carry on having fun and freaky conversations over the bar while we did justice to those too.

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