The French novelist George Sand summed up the human condition perfectly when she wrote: “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” Forget money, acclaim, power and prestige; when all of life’s clutter is stripped away, we need two things above all others: to love and to be loved.
Spare a thought then for Yaya Touré, the man who did not receive a cake from his employers on his 31st birthday. Touré’s agent, the ever reasonable Dimitri Seluk, pointed out this grave injustice to the media: “When it was Roberto Carlos’s birthday, the president of Anzhi gave him a Bugatti,” said a concerned Seluk.
“I don’t expect City to present Yaya with a Bugatti. We only asked that they shook his hand and said ‘we congratulate you’. It is the minimum they must do when it is his birthday and the squad is all together. I hear one newspaper has written that City congratulated him from Twitter but this is a joke. It is better they don’t put anything on Twitter if they are not saying anything to him.”
The message is simple: Premier League footballers are not immune from the human condition and, like the rest of us, they prefer cake to mentions on Twitter. So let’s use Touré’s 32nd birthday as an opportunity to show footballers that we have not forgotten them. Design a cake – or a card, or ever a present if you’re feeling very generous – for a footballer and send it to us through GuardianWitness or by emailing gallery@theguardian.com. We will publish the best mock-ups in the next few days.
And, if today is your birthday, have a wonderful time.
