Yesterday, it was my birthday! I'm now 18, and adult, and a man! I can now commit child abuse and be prosecuted as an adult, I can legally drink alcohol, and legally complain about kids today. I can shout "get off my lawn!", "bloody kids", and "back in my day..." to my heart's content.

I WANT TO BE YOUNG AGAIN!

The most exciting thing that happend yesterday was a massive party that I hosted. I didn't think I had that many friends! 17 people turned up overall. They were...

Heather (oh, and the rumours are true), JD, Emma, Soph, Matt, Stephen, Heggs, Craig, Dundas, Andy, Danny, Scot, Bailey, Kim, Chris, Bouff, and Teb.

Of course, this probably isn't very interesting if you don't know them.

I think the general consensus is that everyone had a lovely time (based on a survey of me). To get the obvious out of the way: the Coke intake was at six. Two before the party, four during it.

The one unfortunate thing that prevented my wild teenage rave from being as house destroying as it was, aside from the lack of "hard house trance" or whatever, was my parents were in the other room. Whilst this helped with the general management of the festivities, my mum insisted on showing everyone a baby photo and trying to embarrass me. I swore at her a bit and she continued un-phased.

Despite it being a birthday party, I wasn’t expecting any presents- some of my friends got me one anyway! This was horrendously nice of them. Heather got me this amazing “20 questions” gadget. You, the player, thinks of anything, and it will, almost without fail guess exactly what you are thinking of. For example, “is it an animal?”, “is it a mammal?”, and so on. It’s weird, I’ve no idea how it works. Is there a database inside with billions and billions of objects and their descriptions listed? It got Guinea Pig, it got napkin, it got electricity, it got candle… it was amazing. Does it use the GSM network to connect back to base, where there are thousands of people tapping away at keyboards asking these questions? Either way, it scared the crap out of me. (Not literally).

JD & Emma got me the League of Gentlemen box set, which I’m greatly looking forward to watching, and Matt got me In Love and Death by The Used. From the songs I’ve heard of theirs, they’re an upbeat lot full of positive messages. I love optical media!

Excitingly, Danny got me a little device that keeps the fizz in bottles, somehow, which was perfect apt for Chris & Kim’s present… a bottle of coke! (She also got me some Cadbury’s Miniature Heroes, which I think everyone agreed were very nice indeed). I was delighted. Bailey, Scot and Ben (who wasn’t there, but I spoke to today) also forced money on me! I tried to refuse but they insisted! Everyone who got me presents: thank you very much!

Also excitingly, my good friend Michael, who's a northerner, phoned and texted me from Wales, where he was on holiday to wish me a happy birthday- which was a very nice gesture. I attempted to ring him back to thank him, but due to the wildness of the party, it was largely incoherent.

Describing a party is actually really difficult- we didn’t so much do anything as just sit about and slack, which was lovely, but isn’t very easy to write about. As such, here’s comments and observations on some of the photographs I took:

We did some real life photoshopping!

Yes, these are “Bratz” party hats. I didn’t buy them, my socially and culturally conscious mother bought them in her ignorance. I’m eighteen and male, not nine and female! I managed to remove them before most people turned up, thankfully.

Matt has had his face disfigured. He should have mounted a flag on a cocktail stick or one of those little drinks umbrellas in it.

Something that was nice was that six of my friends who I’ve known since early primary school were here to celebrate my birth with me. It was very old skool.

Heather really dislikes having her photo taken, for some reason. This is similar to my sister, Lucy. Women, eh? (Ignore JD).

Matt looks a bit like Devvo, the chav from Fat-Pie.

Thanks for coming, everyone!