Many of my favourite childhood memories are about birthday parties – both mine and my sister’s. We’re talking slightly wonky (but lovingly made) cake in the shape of a hedgehog; the distinctive tang of candle smoke; Fox’s Party Rings; cheese and pineapple on sticks, and drop-waisted party dresses – the whole, glorious Eighties shtick.

I am intensely grateful to my mum for marking these early birthdays as joyous occasions, but I’m also aware that somewhere in your 20s, you’re supposed to stop feeling the need to celebrate your birthday with quite the same spirit of reckless enjoyment.

You’re allowed to make a bit of a fuss for the decade-based milestones of course, but otherwise you’re supposed to pretend you can’t even remember when your own birthday is, with a dismissive chuckle as if you’re far too busy doing grown-up things to express such a childish desire for cake and presents.

But though it makes me a bit of an anomaly among some of my friends, I’ve never really believed that birthday parties need to be sacrificed on the altar of adulthood. I might have left the Party Rings behind now I’m in my 30s (more’s the pity), but I still make a point of celebrating my birthday every year, one way or another. To me, it’s one of life’s little rituals – as comforting and grounding as the first barbecue of the summer or the annual return of Bake Off to our screens (despite this year’s channel-changing trauma).

“In defence of birthday parties: why I’ll unashamedly go all out each and every year”