I am feeling a little rough today, but in a really great way. Thanks to my usual last-minute dithering as to whether I really wanted to celebrate my birthday, I sent out an invitation five days before my planned date to book others. Yes. Five days, before a weekend and during the busy festive period. I am that bad at this.

As an aside, I'll just add that of course I want to celebrate my birthday, so I don't know why I even bothered to have an internal debate about it. It's just that I have so few close friends in London compared to Singapore that I just get depressed thinking about how few will actually be there for any birthday thing, and how few friends I've made since moving over here. It's not really a function of me as a person, but more to do with the fact that London is a busy, hectic city made up mostly of transients, rendering it almost impossible for people to connect as we did back in school.

But back to my birthday celebration. I have the best friends and family in the world. It was a small celebration, but my friends did the small things which made me happy. I had a birthday cupcake, complete with birthday candle, presented to me in the middle of a very busy bar/club, played table tennis in a fiercely-contested family match which I did not win despite threatening to tell their mother, and even a birthday dance which my best friend's husband gave me.

(NB: I know the definition of best means just one, but if you keep up, I have three best friends, or, two best friends and a person, but, still, they all mean so much to me that I don't ever want to call one best over the other.)

In spite of the difficulties that've come my way this way - romance-wise, job-wise and just wondering when was the last time I did something to be truly proud of - I've had a pretty awesome year. And that's mostly down to my awesome friends who are always there for me, my brilliant family who've helped me out so much especially when it came to buying my flat, and, of course, me, for having the incredible toughness of spirit and joie de vivre I sometimes forget I have.

So here's to my last few days of being a twenty-something. It's been an incredible decade, and I've no doubt I'll continue to kick ass or better in my thirties.