Three girls in my recent life share the same birthday. Discounting sociological mating patterns and zodiacal zygote formations which sway the statistics, the odds of this happening are about 50 million to one.

That's too high odds for the universe to resist. When anything has odds of 50 million to one, you can be pretty sure of it happening right away.

One of the January 19th birthday brigade is a friend. One was a lover and a friend and now just a friend in love with someone else. And one was a fuck and is now nothing to me as I am nothing to her. A pretty selfish fuck, as it happens, but what can you expect from someone who looks like Audrey Hepburn and earns billions of dollars a year?

My agent is annoyed with me. He saw this coming he says. "A lifetime of wisdom can be snuffed out by a cute ass in a red thong," he says.

I chew the lecture. I don't think about red thongs but about January birthdays.

"Love is like life," my agent is yelling at me, almost at breaking point from my recent behaviour. "Love's death is irreversible!" he screams.

I've had this lesson a hundred times. I've even done detention. I've been held back year after year, like no other student ever before me.

It's not I'm lazy. It's not I can't understand.

It's just, when it comes down to it, the lessons go right out the window when the examination begins.

"From first eye contact there's trouble," my agent is yelling down the phone. "Celibacy is the new casual relationship!"

He gets all this from Cosmopolitan.

The trouble with Cosmopolitan magazine is it doesn't tell the truth.

I was once asked to write a few words on love for the UK edition, my girlfriend too, our joint stories to appear as a snippetty column on the page template known in the industry as the "buy more copies because you're in it" feature section.

"Be honest," said the magazine. "We want to hear YOUR experiences."

I wrote the first thing that came to mind.

"I love my girlfriend because she has good prospects and a great ass."

"I first realised I was in love with her when I started writing a book about her," I wrote.

Not one of these words was printed. The simple mud hut of my honest bare emotion was razed by a shitehawk work experience gal, redeveloped as a 1990 supermarket cum day-care centre cum stain on the landscape, rendered vague, massive and wrapped in bubble-wrap, regressing thousands of years into zeroth century Roman architecture to be approved by a bland committee of several million readers.

"You're supposed to be writing about love," screams my agent. "Give them what they want!"

Suddenly I want to be in the magazine.

"I love my girlfriend because she has a beautiful smile," I say.

"MORE! Give me more!" My agent's face becomes a happy mess of thready red veins.

"I first fell in love with my girlfriend when we wandered along the beach hand in hand at sunset."

"PARFAIT!" cries my agent, "We have it! Can you give her a disability?"

"I first fell in love with my girlfriend as I wheeled her across the beach and she complained of the sand in her bearings."

"NON NON NON NON you miss the whole point of l'amour," he says.

"Love is conformity," he screams.

But then he heard about the birthdays.

I told him about January 19th. About the 50 million to one odds.

Five times less likely than winning the Florida state lottery.

My agent hears the word "lottery". He perks up. He wants me to write about birthdays.

"C'est remarkable" he says, "this January 19th."

Yeah I say, but it's no spiritual biggy, I just like to fuck goats.

I mean, a few more hours in the womb, a minor birth complication lasting an hour or two each, they'd all be Aquarians. Who cares, right?

It's not like you'd delay the birth to align the stars.

My agent likes that idea.

He is in the library now researching birth delay drugs, vaginal plugs, giant plungers which suck onto a baby's head and force it backwards, cervical bungs.

"Horoscope horror!" he says. "Babies aborted not for being the wrong sex, but the wrong star sign!"

He loves that sort of stuff.

"Aquarius!" he says. "A new master race of Aquarians! It's good. It has legs."

"Water," he says, "is the bringer of life."

And crabs, I say, are the bringer of crabs.

I think I need a new agent. This post was supposed to be a tribute to a special girl, a friend. Someone a cut above. Someone who sees things differently. Someone good to know.

To that person: enough about goats, agents, cosmo - and instead a hearty and loving *salute* from my tattered soapbox. If I had the funds to drag it up to Chep Lap Kok... to claim it at Heathrow luggage belt 4.... to cram it onto the Piccadilly line, to endure the myriad slowing down, stopping, beeping, doors opening, beeping, doors closing, accelerating, slowing down of the tube repeating itself ad nauseam until Hyde Park Corner where the soapbox has its home..... if I could do that I would.

x