I hear through the newspapers that Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando has turned 49. And I also hear through the newspapers that unlike every other person I know who has ever turned 49 (or 29, or 39, or 59 or any other year in between) he thought it would be an excellent idea to behave like a child taking a cake to class, so that everybody would look at him and clap as he cut it and he would feel loved and special.

So Pullicino Orlando took a great, big decorated birthday cake with him to work, with the words to make every child proud iced embarrassingly large across the top: HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFFREY.

Except that he didn’t really take it to work, and that wasn’t really his office. He works at a dentist’s clinic in Haz-Zebbug, where cake and icing sugar are highly inappropriate, and where there are no cameras to film him cutting it anyway. So he took it to the Malta Council of Science and Technology HQ, where he was given the post of chairman as a sop and has refused to relinquish it since.

Jeff, who is probably a certain kind of woman in disguise (the kind who lays cunning traps for the man she fancies – “Oh, so you shop here too?”) had invited the prime minister for a tour of the building specifically on that day, to compromise and embarrass him with that birthday cake under the full glare of the television cameras.

When I first read the story, I wondered why the prime minister was touring the Malta Council of Science and Technology again, what Jeff could possibly have had up his sleeve to think yet another tour necessary to his ends. And then I realised that the birthday cake was it. Yes, it was all about the birthday cake. Then I wondered just how differently wired a man of 49 has to be to sit down and plan these things, these little games of power and compromise and the embarrassment of others, if this is the only way he can get his kicks nowadays.

The saddest aspect of it all was the birthday cake. That HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFFREY was quite tragic and roughly 40 years too late. Perhaps the poor boy never had a birthday party thrown for him when he was the appropriate age, with lots of friends and enthusiastic adults standing around clapping as he blew out the twirly blue candles and cut his cake to cheers, while the Agfa and Kodak instamatic flashes popped.

Perhaps he never had a party with the latest Hallmark and Disney-themed party accessories with matching frilled plates and paper jelly-bowls and streamers and gift-bags for all his little class-mates to take home.

Maybe he never got to play pass the parcel or musical chairs or musical statues or watch reels of cartoons rented from that place in Rue D’Argens and run through his grandfather’s cine-film projector in a darkened drawing-room. Poor little Jeffrey – and given his size now, boy, must he have been little – can’t have had many balloons or sat in huddled excitement at Von Fred the Magician’s feet to marvel at his magnificent 1970s sideburns and watch him slice his lovely assistant (wearing 1970s Lurex) in half or pull a white bunny from his top-hat and a pigeon from his sleeve while the clever Dick at the back yelled ‘I saw you! You had it hidden underneath!”

If this is what Jeffrey has hankered after for so long, then he should have kept it private, stayed home and got Mrs Pullicino Orlando II to make paper bowls of jelly with bits of canned fruit in it, dress up as Von Fred’s lovely assistant and then slice him in half.

But wait. There’s something sadder still. I realise now that poor old Jeffrey was so desperate for some birthday attention that he announced the date four days ahead on Facebook. Almost nobody responded, a far cry from the hundreds of messages he used to get from Laburisti and other loser types when he was busy playing the hero to their gallery some months ago. It’s like the new Woody Allen film, From Rome With Love: they’ve forgotten him already and moved on to the next thing. His fame was transient and he didn’t know it.

Tragically, he plumbs the depths of desperation, trying to ratchet up some fresh enthusiasm for his birthday (and himself) among his rapidly disintegrating crowd of followers. “Thanks for all your messages – they’re greatly appreciated!” he wrote on his Facebook wall, twice. There were all of eight or 10. If they were letters, the postman would have died under the weight of his sack.

Then he told his bored Facebook audience of his birthday plans, perhaps because he doesn’t know that other people’s birthdays and other people’s birthday plans are about as magnetising as other people’s wedding videos and other people’s holiday snaps. “Plans for the day----PM visiting MCST in the morning (he'll be getting some birthday cake) ----- lunch with the kids (wish Jenny was with us) ----- siesta (obligatory when you're getting older :) ) ------meeting with finance minister re. budget------clinic------birthday cake with the family-------romantic dinner with Carmen. Pretty packed, eh ? ---- have a good one.”

Am I the only one thinking how sad and desperate that sounds – like a missive from the outer edges of a major existential crisis? Many of us do that sort of thing on our birthday, but after the age of 25 we don’t feel the urge or the need to tell the world about it to prove to everyone (and, I suspect, to ourselves) that we are loved and wanted.

The moral of this pathetic tale? For pity’s sake, throw a birthday party with sweets and a big cake for your child when he is nine. You really don’t want him growing up to throw one for himself when he is 49. As for the prime minister: Bloody well done. The correct way to deal with other people’s appalling manners is to behave as though you haven’t noticed.