Entwined

Warning: blippers who suffer adverse reactions to sentimentality should stop reading now! 

Almost five years ago, Daniel and Solveig asked me to read at their wedding. It wasn’t hard to decide what that reading should be - this extract from ‘Captain Corelli's Mandolin’  by Louis de Bernières:

Love is a temporary madness.
It erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.
And when it subsides, you have to make a decision.
You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together
that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.
Because this is what love is.
Love is not breathlessness,
It is not excitement,
It is not the promulgation of eternal passion.
That is just being “in love” which any fool can do.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away,
And this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground,
And when all the pretty blossom have fallen from their branches,
They find that they are one tree and not two.

I just love this sentiment - the importance of a quiet growing together rather than a fiery passion. 

Since then, I’ve always wanted to find a pair of trees that had actually grown together over the years, and a few weeks ago I found the perfect example. Two trees, one taller than the other, growing so closely  that their branches have actually grown together - and I’m sure their roots have too. 

And now it’s fifty years since the day we moved from friendship to ‘going out together’ - though it was another six years before we married - I wanted to use the image as a celebration. In the summer of that same year - so long ago in 1972 - a friend asked if he could take photos of us in the local Penrhos Woods for a competition he was entering. I don’t think his photos won any prizes, but I’ve taken one of these and used it in this double exposure - joined together over the years just like those trees. 

Both originals are in extras.