Why I dread my birthday: As far as I’m concerned birthdays bring many unhappy returns

The world divides into two categories: people who make a terrific racket about their upcoming birthday, and people who have pruned that detail from Facebook. The latter category live in fear of the mysterious smell of ganache icing and candle wax, and of the close-range singing of colleagues. The former category need to bloody grow up.

But then I would say that. I try – every October – to fudge my birthday, somehow hoping that this caginess about mortality might buy me more time as a living, breathing human being. And less time as an urn of ashes on a mantelpiece that no one can quite decide where to scatter.

As a birthday-dodger, I'm happy to float agelessly in people's minds, perhaps stuck aged 28 in a flatteringly lit antique byline picture, or as a memory of an 11-year-old netballer in a Goal Defence bib. I prefer to skip my yearly check-in and offer you the truth. As for gifts, I don't care for them either. If I want material items, I'll buy them myself on Amazon Prime, or on secret midweek jaunts to shopping malls, with minimum fuss. The things I really really want – a Santa Monica beachfront house, six more dogs, Goldie Hawn as a dog-walking buddy, longer legs, a prettier face, and the ability to plonk myself down at a piano and honk through “Benny and the Jets” like Elton John, well, you'll find these things hard to wrap.

Sadly, a lovely serving dish from John Lewis doesn't quite do it. Although I will be very, very genuinely grateful when you give me the dish, albeit grateful with rich undertones of embarrassment that you've put me on the spot and forced me to look happy. Plus an undercurrent of guilt that you've gone to all this trouble. You poor thing. Did you carry this dish all the way home on the bus? It must have been heavy. Oh God, was it expensive?

Birthday-lovers would say this was a pile of pretentious, navel-gazing hokum and I need to damn well lighten up. They would say that, of course, because if these people had a birthday in October, they'd have began thrusting the news into casual chat from mid-August onwards with the deft touch of a caffeinated orangutan learning “Frère Jacques” on handbells. The average birthday-lover mentions their birthday with the painful regularity of a malfunctioning smoke alarm.

By now, birthday fans would have created a Twitter and Instagram hashtag like #gracesbirthdaywoohoo, plus a list of suggested gifts would have appeared alongside the hashtags #nudge #wink and #itsmybirthdaysoon! Organisation is of paramount concern for the birthday devotee because he or she will tend to have two or three soirées in different locations, bestowing on an array of friends and family the huge treat of beholding this special sunbeam on their very, very special day. All birthday devotees have a large dose of Roald Dahl's Veruca Salt nestling deep in their DNA.

Hallmark and the birthday-card section of every 24-hour Esso garage are kept alive by the stringent demands of birthday devotees. A million trees weep at the prospect of becoming discarded wrapping paper. Don't even dream of not wrapping a birthday devotee's gift. They do not care that you didn't have time, or access to Sellotape, or that you're in full-body plaster in a hospital bed. Giving a birthday fan a non-wrapped gift is the equivalent of chucking it through their front window attached to a dead kitten.

“But Mum always insists I go home on birthdays!” says the 34-year-old birthday devotee, overlooking the stark fact that she invited herself, she intra-family iCal-scheduled it, and her mother, in truth, can't quite be arsed to remove the cat-litter tray and cross-trainer which now inhabit the “spare” room. Birthday lovers see this as the time of the year when they can feel like Madonna or Kanye at an end-of-tour backstage party, floating through the room, the ambience creaking with adoration, all eyes on them. Birthday-haters would rather glue their face to a wheelie bin than feel that people were being strong-armed to pay tribute to them.

Admittedly, as I say this, I feel the dark misgivings that realists like me are prone to suffer. It is simply easier to bung 10 quid in the office envelope and hope that Jules, who you haven't met, has a great birthday, which you completely know about thanks to her cc-ing more than 300 people into her invite to a roped-off section of a Be At One fun-pub on a Tuesday night between “6 and Crazy O'Clock”. To which Jules adds, “NB, please leave all my gifts on the back table as I'll open them tomorrow lunchtime during the 'Julie is 34 Lunchtime Mingle!', and they'll be on display at the Saturday barbecue which is mainly for family and friends with nippers but please come.”

It was my birthday last Saturday and none of you knew. Birthday-phobic bastards like me chalk that up as a win.

@gracedent