February is a special month for me because it is my birthday month .

This week on Wednesday, 12th February came and went ( as it does every year ) . Now the 12th is my birthday and since this wasn’t a milestone but it seems it was .

That evening daughter No. 1 pointed out that it was a palindrome and I realised I was celebrating a special birthday after all – a palindromic birthday.

Now what is a palindromic birthday ? And , cor that matter , what is a palindrome ?

Well, a palindrome is a word or sentence that reads the same right to left or left to right.

A famous example of a palindrome is

MADAM I’M ADAM .or closer to home MALAYALAM.

I never thought it applied to numbers but it does . So today , when written in DDMMYYYY format becomes 12022021.

And if it is written digitally it becomes an ambigram or a word that reads the same upside down as well .

That’s quite amazing isn’t it ?

And this birthday did turn out to be special.

Firstly, it was restricted only to family.

Secondly, we had dinner at home.

Thirdly, we tried a completely new cuisine from a new restaurant ( SeoulMate) . I normally go for the tried and tested to avoid any disappointment on my birthday but this time I left everything to Daughter No1 who did the ordering and organising and came up with the yummiest food

Fourthly, I didn’t blow out any candles because we had a pie instead of a cake. We tried Shireen Adenwalla’s Banoffee Pie and I must say we weren’t disappointed. But in all honesty, my homemade one is real value for money.

Lastly and most importantly, though this was a ‘quiet’ celebration, it was really quite noisy with my Little Ones carrying on the show . Ms Papaya took us through a quiz, devised entirely by herself . Wow Dinga was the DJ and curated a play list of HIS favourite songs . I must say I was amazed that this 8 year old loves heavy metal and I was taken back to the days when my teenage brother used to pelt our eardrums with his loud music . And Little Po, not to be left behind entertained us with his specially scary made up story and a lovely rendition of ‘Vincent’ and a Malayalam song .

So this palindromic and ambigramic really turned out to be a special birthday after all .

Have any of you had a palindromic birthday? Was it any different?

Well, that’s all from me this week .

Ciao