To R. on his birthday

You've been drinking vodka, no? And in your 37th year discovering you're actually a poet ...

7 is my lucky number. So as a present, I'm sharing that luck with you. So 37's going to be big for you in some way. You'll discover a course, an inner resource, a passion you never knew.

And it will shake things, and it will be scary, and it will be exciting. But it won't include time to sit and be sad for a past that can't be re-lived or for a future that seems impossible. Wild things will be possible.

Because now, you've got 37 on loan. For a whole year. It even points forward, 37 does. See it? ...

Wake up groggy head. Your year is starting ....

And if you're wondering what to do:

Penguin has a new series of books, Great Ideas. Little beautiful, designed reprints of thoughts and essays by the world's greatest thinkers Seneca, de Montaigne, Schopenauer, Woolf. They're cheap and portable and insightful. Maybe it will waken a hunger for things bigger than your imagination and more beautifully worded than your fears.

Jem's new cd, Finally Woken, is gorgeous and other worldly and hip-swivellingly good. It's as if Dido was talented or the streets of Italy were made melody. They make one feel sexy. They make one want to flirt and lick someone's neck.

And you're 37. 7. It looks like tented trousers. So it must be the year of good sex too. Bonus.

And we shed baggage. Things that inhibit 20 year olds and friends that proved to have no endurance and the blinders that made us think we had to find one path when the fields were open for running.

And we take things on. Years of experience. Things people told us. Better understanding of the world. Distance. The dust of travels and sights and Paris and Prague and London and Eureka on your ankles. We share the sky and the universal language of a smile even if every 12 hours or so we have to send the sun back the other way.

Seneca says that a life well lived isn't short. It's rich. So remember that next time you're tempted to lay in bed and think too much. You could be out dirtying your feet and finding new experiences. The Flaneur knows that the walk unplanned can show as much about a place as one that's planned and will show something new and unexplored. Secret passages lie around the corner. Some of them take you places and some of them take you back where you were, but very few go nowhere at all.

You're 37. Your year is started. Go.