It 's an inexorable process and one we all share; that as each successive year goes by we celebrate another birthday. For me that time is nigh; two weeks from now I'll have attained my 82nd birthday. My husband is forever 'catching up' with me. His birthday comes along four weeks later when he too will be 82 years of age. We have shared this little scenario since we were both 14 years old, when we first met and became fast companions.

Yet when my birthday rolls around he is caught in a dilemma, a compulsive need to present me with something that will reflect the event. Every day of our lives together he offers me happiness and contentment. That gift surmounts any trinket that could be viewed as a memento of our love. He knows that but is overwhelmed by the need to please me with something expressing how he feels about me. His expansive loving smile that competes with the sun does that, and so do the hugs he proffers constantly.

At a time of year when the community around us is frantically shopping for gifts at Christmas time, my husband ponders what it is that he can present to me as a surprise and a gift for my birthday. There have been quite a few of those; gifts and birthdays. The gifts are redundant, the birthdays are not. But it excites and pleases him no end that we are in a position financially that he can look about and select something, usually a piece of jewellery, to surprise me with. From the time I was a little girl in a family struggling to surmount poverty, jewellery fascinated me. Now I have those things given me for my birthdays; a watch, a bracelet, a ring, a necklace. And so, I have many such items.

When he succeeds in finding something that he decides is appropriate to the occasion, the panic he feels subsides slightly, he is reassured that the deed is done. But he is functionally incapable of putting the item away for presentation on my birthday. And anxiety begins to build back up again; he has the gift, why not give it to me, his reasoning nags at him. And so, he does just that. It doesn't matter that I suggest I have no need for anything more, and not to bother. He usually turns a deaf ear to such recommendations in any event.

This time, he told me, he bought two items because he couldn't resist the impulse. So, he said, he was prepared to give me one of the items immediately and withhold the other for my birthday. That's what happened. Until a day later he said he could no longer stand the suspense and needed to give me the second item, long before my birthday. So that's what happened.

What else happens? He sets himself a target of creating a birthday card for me. They're usually large-format, painted in water-colour, depicting scenes of our lives at any given time, or of gardens and flowers, or of our little dogs, now that our children are grown and middle-aged. It is the resulting card that he props up on my bedside table the night before my birthday dawns that is the meaningful gift. One for each of my birthdays.