On being 60, and Patrick O'Brian

 I was 60 on Sunday. I've known for several years that this significant birthday would fall at a weekend, and so had that pinned as the climax of a number of celebratory events to take place during the year, to include:

• A seriously large wargame in Shedquarters.
• A lawn game in the grounds of Trebian Towers (I was going to ask Tim Gow of "Megablitz and More" to organize this. He doesn't know).
• Some sort of garden party for friends, family and ex-work colleagues.
• A game of Tunnels and Trolls, picking up from where we left off 10 years ago.
• Attendance at some really keen musical and sporting events.
• A driving tour up to Scotland, taking in Culloden, Loch Ness, the Highlands and also the cultural joys of Edinburgh.

As it turns out, absolutely none of these has been ticked off, which is a bit of a bummer.

With all the uncertainty this will come as no surprise. Luckily both the children and their partners visited over the weekend (although not at the same time) and we played some board games, drank some fizzy wine, ate cake and other nice food. Mrs T and I even watched "The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists!", which is an awesomely good and much under rated film.

This nearly didn't occur, as we could not lay our hands on our copy of it (and I know I have one), so in the end I rented it off Amazon for £2.49.

Why it was re-titled and re-dubbed for US audiences I have no idea. Perfect as it is.

Aware that it was going to be the case a few months back that my bullet list would not be completed, I decided to mark the year in a slightly different way. My father, who passed away in 2013, was a big Patrick O'Brian fan. He had all of the novels, including at the end a few first editions, and I inherited them, al 20/21 (the last is unfinished). During his life I borrowed and read most of them (maybe all - I can't recall) and we would often talk about them. He never really shared the joy I found in my favourite author at the time, but no matter: we could share the adventures of Aubrey and Maturin, in the same way we shared a love of cricket and a desperate hope that Arsenal were going to get it sorted this year. The last visit my father ever made to a cinema (problems with hips made sitting a long time a trial) was with me to go and see "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World". Although the film took liberties  with various story lines, the presence of the fabled "two weevils" joke made it all worth while. I knew that my father had decided he was nearing the end - it took over a year - when those books sat on his shelf in his room at the care home untouched. His absolute conviction that they bore reading repeatedly, and if you looked hard enough there was always something new to discover, was dimmed. He wasn't unhappy, I hope, it just wasn't a place he wanted to read those books. They were read in his favourite armchair at home, with a G&T or a decent glass of wine.

So my 60th year bullet list became the idea that I'd read them all, back to back, in order. And I finished the last, unfinished, novel ("21") this afternoon, the day after my birthday, sat on the deck in the sunshine, with a suitable beverage.

I had forgotten, if I ever realised, that the books follow pretty much seamlessly on from one another. Unlike the Hornblower novels they were written in order and they also end, often, at the full climax, with the final naval battle, or the critical announcement. To compare them to LOTR, they normally end with the Ring going into Mount Doom, so to speak, without the return to the Shire and all the other shenanigans. It leaves you wanting more, but is certainly unconventional.

I had also not realised - entirely because I had not read them at the time - how much the books owe to Jane Austen rather than C S Forester (which I have read). The characterisations and the domestic plot lines have so many echoes of Austen's work. Aubrey's mother in law, the awful Mrs Williams, would have much to say to and share with Mrs Bennett.

The books are compelling, and there is a desire to know what happens next and you do really care for the central protagonists. They are not perfect, however. O'Brian isn't the sparsest of writers and there really is no need to re-iterate in every book that the Surprise is a really weatherly ship and a sweet sailer. I would also have been quite happy never to read that another futtock shroud had been furled after a couple of books. Yes, the research and the detail is amazing but really? Pages of descriptions of bl**dy sails and bl**dy sheets. Do real sailors even enjoy that? And also, by the end, I was quite prepared to take the next ruddy bird and shove it up Dr Maturin's fundament.

But even so, I am sorry to have finished. The last, incomplete, fragment is, I would suggest, a mistake. There's clearly a simmering story of great tension there, but we have no idea of how it will play out. What we do have is ill-fleshed out. It does the memory a dis-service if that's what you are left with remembering. I don't know if my father ever read it. I bought it for him, but he was a bit contemptuous or frustrated by it all, recognising it as a last desperate attempt to monetise anything the man had produced. It's a good thing that Terry Pratchett's unfinished work has not seen the light of day, and I still almost wish I hadn't bothered reading the last one of his that was published anyway.

As I read the books there was a lot (like really a lot) that I'd forgotten, but there were also bits I remember my father and I talking about. And as we got to the last few, when he was getting hardbacks, there it was, a dedication to him from my mother, a book bought for him as a present on their 45th or 46th wedding anniversary, and then one from me, inscribed to him as a birthday present.

There were many things we didn't share. He never got sf or heavy metal. I never got jazz. These books bridged the gap, and I can only regret that I can no longer phone him up and tell him how much I enjoyed that last one, or how such and such really irritated me.

All of which is a bit more maudlin that I normally write. It occurred to me whilst reading them that it has been seven years since he died, and for various reasons I don't know that I've ever really said good-bye properly. The scattering of ashes was less satisfactory than I would have liked, and the location is less easy for us to visit than I originally thought it would have been. On the day itself I ended up just managing the process for the family, rather than taking the opportunity to say farewell as I should have. We've never been back, but then I don't need that to talk to him in my head. The books bring me closer to him than any place, now that the house is gone and sold on several times. They sat there, in the lounge, in that small book shelf niche, next to the fire, always in my eyeline when we were there. When I see them, my parents house unfolds around them, and he's there, with my mother.

I don't know if I'll ever bother reading them again, but I'm never giving them way.