I shouldn't be here. I really shouldn't. And yet somehow I've made it through to another birthday. How the hell did that happen?
I should have made at least one fatal mistake by now. Crossed the street into the path of an unseen car. Ventured too close to the edge of a platform and stumbled. Walked down the wrong alleyway and met some angry criminal with a knife. Picked up some nasty virus, choked on a careless bone, swallowed from the wrong bottle in the kitchen. Tumbled from a mountainside, fallen off a ladder, slipped down some stairs. There are so many things that could have gone terribly, terminally wrong - and it only takes one. But I've been lucky.
I really shouldn't be here at all. I blame my parents, it's all their fault. One random summer's day in 1964, that's when the crucial deed happened. I wasn't there, obviously, but it remains the most important event in my entire life. They couldn't have known what they were letting themselves in for. They can't possibly have imagined how it might all turn out. But nine months later I appeared, on my mother's birthday no less, and I wouldn't be here otherwise.
The chances of me actually being here are astronomically small. I could so easily have been somebody completely different. I could have been a girl - heads I was, tails I'm not. I could have been taller, shorter, darker, frecklier, hairier, stupider, disableder, whatever. I could have inherited a gene for shopping, or a sporting talent, or a dyslexic inability to spell. It's all a matter of genetics, and only one sperm out of 50 million could have generated me.
I definitely shouldn't be here at all. If there'd been something good on the telly that night, I'd never have been created. If my parents had lingered over dessert for a few additional minutes, a different set of chromosomes would have combined. Even 24 hours earlier, the circumstances just wouldn't have been right. I'd be so utterly completely different - with a different personality, and a completely different outlook on life, in completely different circumstances. Hell, I might even have gone through the same process and generated a few random offspring myself.
I'm only here courtesy of my parents. I'm only here because they happened to meet, by chance, in an unlikely corner of Hertfordshire. I'm only here because they fancied each other, and eventually got married, and didn't have any other children before they had me. But my parents shouldn't be here either, for precisely the reasons of improbability I've outlined above. And neither should any of my grandparents, or my great-grandparents, and so it goes on.
Indeed I'm only here following an incredibly unlikely series of emotional attractions and geographical coincidences dating back to the dawn of time. I'm only here because all my ancestors happened to meet, and have sex with, precisely the right person, and because none of them got killed off by illness or accident before child-bearing age. The chances of this happening must be absolutely infinitesimal. But here I am.
You shouldn't be here either. You really shouldn't. And you shouldn't be reading this, because I shouldn't have written it. And today really shouldn't be my birthday. Viewed like that, becoming another year older is a complete triumph.
I shouldn't be here. I really shouldn't. And yet somehow I've made it through to another birthday. How the hell did that happen?
