THE best-laid plans of mice, men and women planning birthday outings, often go awry.

Well they did this time anyway.

I thought my birthday was at a bit of a rubbish time, falling at the beginning of February, but my boyfriend’s one, in the first week of January, is even worse.

People often struggle to muster the enthusiasm to do anything so soon after the festivities, excesses and expense of Christmas and New Year.

And if your birthday falls shortly after Christmas your present haul can often be a bit lacking too, perhaps because people couldn’t be bothered to give your gift a lot of thought along with all the other things they had to buy or because they decided to pick you up a bargain in the sales and didn’t give too much thought to whether you’d actually want the gift in question.

It was with this in mind, and the fact that it was his first birthday since we started seeing each other, that I decided to make sure my boyfriend’s birthday was a special one.

We hadn’t planned to do anything over the top and it started well. He liked his presents, or had the good sense to say he did, and enjoyed having breakfast in bed, complete with toffee flavoured birthday cake.

But unfortunately when the time came to hop in his car for nice, albeit chilly, trip down to Bournemouth beach, things started to go wrong. The various illuminated lights on his dashboard indicated that a trip to the garage was in order, where he was told that the car wasn’t drivable.

We changed our plans and still had a good time but the worry about how much the repairs were going to be was hard to shake off, as was the horror when the £800 quote came in!

We made the best of the day, but it wasn’t the kind of stress free, escape from everyday life that we had planned.

I suppose that’s just life. Sometimes things are going to go wrong at particularly bad times. And really, it wasn’t the worst time in the world for a car to break down. I think he should still get a pleasant, hassle-free birthday so have decided that he can have two, like the Queen, with the next one falling when the weather’s a bit nicer. Unlucky in cars, lucky in love maybe!