I'm Very Busy

Billed as a ‘nearly forgotten birthday book’ the new offering from Oliver Jeffers is an exploration of our allegedly ‘busy’ lives and a quietly resolute bid to encourage readers to hold on fast to what really matters in our ever-changing landscape.

Even the solitary birthday cake, alone on a page with just one candle, before the story begins is indicative of the sentiment behind ‘I’m very busy’. It suggests something of the isolate lives we now live, where it is so easy to forget those around us and indeed the days that are special to others; but it perhaps suggests too something of the simpler times we have lost – when just one cake was enough.

We meet Bridget on page one, looking forward to a lovely day spent with friends…although it isn’t until several pages later, when we have met her very busy friends, that we learn it is in fact not just a lovely day, but Bridget’s birthday. It appears her friends have forgotten in the midst of their very busy lives – each offers Bridget a cliché idiom as consolation for their inability to attend, something which will hopefully resonate and encourage the adults reading this title to think as much as the young readers of this book.

Bridget’s disappointment is so evocatively depicted in Jeffer’s characteristic style that it would be impossible for a reader of any age not to pause in their own ‘very busy lives’ and consider Bridget’s fate. There are no words at all on the next page as Bridget sets out her own birthday tea with her toys – another masterful act from Jeffers, reminding us that whilst we often quickly offer words and phrases without thought as we endeavour to rush on to the next event, there are some times and experiences in life where no words are adequate and you can only acknowledge the feelings that are present and sit with them.

Hope is finally offered as the friends realise their error and rally to arrange an impromptu birthday part and, in an instant, Bridget is at once having the lovely day with friends that she had hoped for. Further messages abound here – the idea that is never too late to acknowledge an error and alter the outcome of the day, that sometimes something simple such as a shared cake can be just as significant as the more elaborate plans we often involve ourselves in now, the overarching reminder that we are simply never ‘too busy’.

It is unsurprising that Jeffers has produced another masterful example of how to navigate the world around us and to hang onto meaning wherever we can find it. This is a title as much for the adults reading it, as for the children they are reading it to.