52 years ...

Yesterday I was recalling where we were sixteen years ago; today I'm remembering much further back, to July 1970, when we were married. It was a muggy, still day, with sun to greet us when we emerged from the Memorial Chapel at Glasgow University, and a thunderstorm in the evening. I've blipped about this before, for like all anniversaries it has a way of recurring, but today I'm thinking that even our parents were younger then than we are now, and recalling how, for all the subsequent turns in the path that landed me actively in the Episcopal Church I was at the time a nominal Presbyterian who'd only been to churches to sing for the past ten years, though significantly one of these churches had been the Cathedral of The Isles, and one of the ushers at the wedding was the friend who was then the organist of the cathedral and still is, all these years later. The ceremony was conducted by the University Chaplain, David Millar, who, I seem to recall, came home from a holiday in order to marry us. 

Today, 52 years on, we nearly killed ourselves with ... gardening. In the strange muggy wind, filled with the kind of ultra-fine drizzle that makes you feel as if you're walking some Highland ridge, we attacked the huge hedge that separates our back garden from that of our neighbours, raked up all the cuttings, bagged them, cut the grass, bagged the grass, and hauled heavy pots of roses and other jaggy plants around to get them out of the way - and put them all back again after. Glamorous it was not, though the garden looks a lot less terrifying. 

Dinner was one of Himself's curries and a glass of white wine (carefully drunk as an apero; curry changes the taste too much.) We shall postpone any further celebrations, we decided, until we're back in Edinburgh and have a decent restaurant to go to - the lovely place where we had our Ruby wedding celebrations in Dunoon has been closed since Covid, and though we hear rumours of a resurrection it will be too late even for our relaxed attitudes to dates. 

Last thought about our wedding day: we look so young, and yet at the time we were the last of our friends to get married and felt quite old. Children, I say - just children!

And weren't wedding dresses demure in 1970?