My flatmate is either dyslexic or has a better knowledge of English than I thought…

So I’m now a quarter of a century old! 25 – 2, 5. Yep, that’s right, yesterday I had my biggest birthday since my 21st, and probably the last one I’ll be able to look forward to without hot sweats and panic about losing the last remainders of my youth.

Having said that, now that I’ve experienced three birthdays in Germany, I can say that I won’t have any problems turning thirty here; because if there’s one thing Germans understand, it’s how to feiern a Geburtstag – and I’m not just talking about alcohol consumption here, although that too is involved.

No, the really great thing about having a Geburtstag in Germany is not the beer, but that Germans make a really big deal of you. It’s not just a “oh, look at you, you’re a year older – here, have a box of cut-price chocolates and let’s go to the pub”-thing like a birthday in Britain; here, it’s a you-festival of gigantic proportions where everyone gets very excited about, well, you. It’s you-you-you – or rather me-me-me – in a way that would never be tolerated in my home country, not even when dealing with children.

Thanks to asparagus_hunter on Flickr

When I think back my time in primary school in the early nineties on the outskirts of London, when you had a birthday the teacher read out your name after the register, you got a round of grudging applause from the other children and then you sat back down to colouring in your rectangles and triangles and trying to stop the kid next to you digging a pencil into your shoulder for kicks – or whatever it was we used to do back then.

Recently, however, I witnessed a birthday in a German primary school. The last lesson was cut short by fifteen (count ‘em!) minutes so that the child in question could hand out sweets to the others, repeatedly blow out candles on a birthday cake (yes! A cake! In school!) and then dance around excitedly for the remainder of the lesson. She was crowned the Geburtstagskönigin – or birthday queen – by the sole figure of adult authority in the room (i.e.: not me) and then allowed to do whatever she saw fit until the end of the day. As her mother picked her up after the lesson was over, I heard her shout “No mummy, I’m not putting on my coat today. And I’m not going to brush my teeth either!” As she shouted this, half-chewed gummy-bears and a few rotting milk-teeth came spewing out of her sugar-addled mouth. She followed it up by kicking her parent in the shins and then roaring “I’m birthday-queen and I command you to grovel before me and beg for your life!”

Okay, so I made that last bit up, but you get my point. Children out here learn very young that their birthday is the one day in the year when they can do anything they want, and this attitude –astonishingly enough – continues right into adulthood. In fact, I got called Geburtstagskind or “birthday child” several times yesterday, indicating just how essentially childish Germans get about the whole thing.

But of course, being childish is great fun! After all, it was the Gerrman-speaking Sigmund Freud who coined the term Regression, so these guys clearly know just how great it is to be five again for a day. And so on your birthday, no matter how old, you get everything your average five-year-old craves: heaps of presents, piles of sweets and lots and lots of attention. You also get some other stuff that five-year-olds don’t even know about, like alcohol.

Thanks to Flickr-user lincolnian_(Brian) – great name in brackets there, mate!

Whatever it is you get for your birthday in Germany, however, the main point is this: it should, wherever possible, be on the day itself. In the U.K., having a birthday on a Monday or a Tuesday is a clear invitation to simply relocate the whole affair to the nearest convenient weekend. Anyone you live with will say “Happy Birthday” on the day, give you a card and then forget about the whole thing until such time as you’re ready to drink excessively.

Germans don’t like that much. In most offices, people who have holiday left over take it on their birthday. If they’ve got none left, they come in, but they’re not seriously expected to work. In fact, they tend to bring a spread of rolls, cakes and sweets and a few bottles of bubbly Sekt with them and stop everyone else from working, too. And even if you’re an ascetic British freelancer such as myself who is congenitally incapable of taking time off until his work is under control, you’re not safe on the day: holed up at my desk, in my room, with the doors locked and nothing more than water in the house, the veritable flood of calls, text messages and e-mails essentially still stopped me from doing anything worthwhile yesterday. None of my customers cared that their articles and translations came in late, though: after all, they were on the blower to the Geburtstagskind too.

In fact, they were surprised that I’m waiting until Saturday to really hit the booze and were almost disappointed that they would get work out of me before then. Then again, this went down better than my plan last year of celebrating my birthday on Saturday 7th March. Vorfeiern? Geht gar nicht! German are really superstitious about doing anything birthday-related before the day itself, and so last year I had to wait until midnight for the Geburtstagskind-magic to kick in – no presents, no hugs, no nothing. Except beer, of course, but then again, there’s always some of that around here…