underestimated by a good two months.The wedding fever. After a very
pleasant New Year with Simon’s parents, Nick and Deryn, (which featured our inaugural meeting of the Wedding Management Committee) we came home and settled into counting and measuring and caterers menus and leaflets on toilet hire and swatches of silk and names and addresses of half the western world.
t was very exciting to be given the use of a friend’s thatched barn (an 18th century granary) for a venue, with the adjacent water garden, and bordering his own broad. That sort of fixed it in space- nailed it down, as it were. The dining table disappeared under a blizzard of ivory silk and net, in the Spring. We ate at the little table in the lounge, for a while, then that succumbed to the silken epidemic- magenta for the adult bridesmaid, and sugar pink for the 8yr old. It’s a good job we had such a fine summer because we had to eat outside, three times a day for about four months.
uddenly we awoke one morning to the alarm shrilling ‘It’s the Glorious 12th!’ and it was pissisting down! It hardly let up all day. We should have traded the horse-drawn landau for a steam launch. But it didn’t matter. It really didn’t matter. We had all the sunshine we needed in the happy couple. Only the parents of a girl will know the sweet relief of seeing their daughter safely delivered into loving and trustworthy hands.
eter said he had never seen his barn looking so good. The beams were in leaf again, with green boughs, and pink blossomed with balloons and ribbons. The ladies had responded to Miriam’s call for dressing up and big hats. They all looked like stars of stage, screen and fashion. Simon had drafted in his own minister and musicians, as guest artists, and having seen their acts, I fully understood why. It was truly a day of joy and festive celebration. We had about a week to re-establish normal service, then we began the photo-fest. That’s still going on.
h yes, there were other events and happenstances during the year. First there was my venture into having my own stand at the Norfolk Show, in June, which necessitated buying a marquee- 3m x 6m- handy for the wedding. In spite of regular exhibitors moaning about it being the worst year ever for shows, and the stalls on either hand doing zero trade, I managed to recoup all my outgoings, plus a few bob, so we’ll definitely do it again, next year, plus the Suffolk Show at Eye, and the Worsted Festival. It won’t run to a Vardo and a pie-bald pony, but our new Rover Tourer will make us self-sufficient with regard to haulage.
n September, I received my Senior Citizen’s Giro, and at the end of BST closed the studio for good, as mooted last year. It wasn’t quite as simple as that though. I was already booked into hospital for late November to have my right shoulder joint replaced, but got a phone call on Oct.19th inviting me in on Sun 22nd for the operation next day because they’d had a cancellation. This also meant having a pre-op assessment next day. So this left Valerie manning the studio for the last week, visiting me in the evenings, and affecting the final closure of the studio. It all worked out fine; the final score being two hips, two shoulders, and I’m recovering nicely.
allowed three weeks rest (including the week in hospital) three weeks to work up stock for the exhibition, and a week to hang it, the exhibition being Dec 9th & 10th, which is about as late as it can get. The physio threw a wobbler when I talked about working already, until I told her the most efficacious treatment or medicine is no match for self employment. If everyone could become subcontractors, the health bill would be halved overnight.
fter the exhibition, we have just one week before Simon, Miriam and John come to spend an early Christmas with us, over Miriam’s birthday weekend (her 21st; I have to bake a cake) They will all be gone by Wednesday, leaving Valerie and me to just relax and wind down to a very laid-back Christmas, with just the two of us pleasing ourselves, dipping into mince pies, carols videos, books, nuts, TV, port, as the fancy takes us. We’ve already decided on a whole beef fillet, running red, just how we like it. It has the added attraction of not keeping us in the kitchen half the day.
can already smell the Christmas spice and the Frankincense in the oil burners; if I squint, I can already see the glow on the tangeroons and the clemmingteems. I can almost hear the rustle of the ghosts getting comfy in the inglenook. Okay! Play the music! Open the cage!
If your Christmas is as good as ours, and we really hope it is, then you’ll be well suited.