I was terribly impressed. It reinforced my certainty that I was on the right track.


Yes, it’s genuine Victorian. And I knew quite enough, even then, to appreciate that he’d ruined its monetary value by writing in it (not shown), and that this indicated True Love.

I’m not expecting flowers, a card or the like today. He’s been showing quite enough love, for better, for worse etc, to take him through the rest of our lives, whatever happens. It’s a lot of work, marriage – however, in the long run …

… it’s worth the effort.

And, in other news, Winter Olympics! Yay (except for curling and speed skating)!!(!)

The thing I remember most about the flight is flying over Egypt and being terribly excited to see the Nile. I prodded the Sage, who was asleep, and told him. He made a sleepily polite *pretending to be interested* sound and went back to sleep. He was awake when we arrive at Addis Ababa airport, however, and we all filed out on to the tarmac while the plane was refuelled. This is still the only time that I have stood on the African mainland. A small plane lay crumpled a little way away – apparently, it had overshot the runway some days previously, crash-landed and they’d not got around to moving it yet. I still appreciate that relaxed attitude.

We landed again, can’t remember where – presumably it was in Mozambique or South Africa, and a number of South Africans embarked. The landing at Mahé was interesting – the airport, which had only been opened the previous year (replacing a much smaller one) was built parallel to the shore so that you felt that you were approaching a narrow landing strip by the sea. Which you were, come to think of it, though I’m sure it has been widened since. We were sprayed with insecticide before landing – apparently, there were no poisonous creatures in the Seychelles and no malarial mosquitoes, and they wanted to keep it that way.

The Sage’s brother had visited the islands the previous year – he had a friend who had moved there and had gone to see him – and recommended it as the most wonderful honeymoon destination he could imagine. And indeed, it was gorgeous. From the moment you stepped off the plane into the warm tropical air, it was a delight.

Many jumbled memories here, and maybe I’ll write them down one day. But for now, there it is – the story of when the Sage and Z were first married.

Tomorrow, something for Valentine’s day, and then normal service (ie general wittering on) will be resumed.

The Sage is completely happy. He’s sitting in an armchair, laptop in front of him, watching today’s auction at Acle online, live.

I’m going to go and make him a cup of tea and make his day complete by adding to the tray a chocolate biscuit.

As an aside from the story of my three-month wedding celebration (honeymoon coming along tomorrow – the actual honeymoon, that is, not the undirty weekend), a quick update on how things are going.

Put simply, fine. It’s been steadily improving all week and, last night, I walked across the room without a stick and, the Sage confirmed, I didn’t limp at all. My right leg still is a shade longer than my left, but either that is lessening or I’m getting used to it, because I hardly notice it. When doing exercises, which I do standing at the bar of the Aga, I can’t freely move my right leg as my foot catches on the ground, so I stand on tiptoe on the left foot, which is fine.

I’ve not been getting out much and walking as far as I should, because the weather has been iffy and I don’t want to slip on frosty ground, and when the weather has been fine, I’ve been busy. However, today I walked to see Kenny and Muriel – I suppose that’s about 350 yards each way and it was quite all right. Further, next week. I’m supposed to walk quite a lot. I’ve got completely out of the way of it, the last few years, because then I wasn’t supposed to have too much weight-bearing exercise.

Talking about weight, I’m still eating enough chocolate.

I spent much of my time in the next few weeks in preparation for our wedding party – sending invitations, booking this and that, choosing stuff – but the pressure was off, as far as I was concerned. Funnily enough, I didn’t mind the thought of being the centre of attention at the party, it was the actual wedding ceremony that had seemed so off-putting.

I can’t remember many specifics about the next three months – I know we had a trip up to Derbyshire to the Sage’s school Gaudy, where former classmates were surprised to find this fairly confirmed bachelor with a very young wife in tow. He was quite roundly teased and I fielded that for him – for someone as shy as I was, I had pretty good social skills, I suppose because in a fairly impersonal social setting one can put on a façade and not have to reveal much of oneself. We stayed, on the way home, in a converted watermill. The next morning at breakfast, I heard an American woman say to her husband, “this is the best cup of coffee since we arrived in England.” Since the coffee was of indifferent quality – as was most coffee in this country at that time – I felt for her, and also warmed to her good nature in putting the best spin on things.

We didn’t have a wedding present list, something that was just becoming popular then. Sensible though they are, I don’t really care for them. Pa and Ma bought us a china dinner service – after many years’ use as ‘best’, it’s now used all the time. My mother bought us Victorian silver flatware (cutlery, darlings), at an auction that the Sage was conducting. He became quite squeaky as the price rose. Again, that service used to be hauled out for best, but we now use it every day.

We never bothered to put the photos from the party in an album, though our parents did, so they’re around somewhere. They were taken by a friend from childhood of my father’s, who was a professional photographer. My father had been best man at his wedding. I have got one photo to show you, however, which my sister-in-law gave us on our 25th anniversary, in a silver frame. It’s come out a bit fuzzy, but then so am I after all these years.

In order, Pa, Ma, the Sage, Z, Mummy, Wink. Only the other day, someone saw the picture and said “is that your two sisters with you?” She’d have been pleased to hear that! She was, in fact, 49 at the time. And the hair colour is natural.

As for pyjamas, which was asked about a few days ago – on discovering that everyone was going to be in DJs or long dresses, my sister-in-law, who didn’t have a long dress, went shopping. She is a frugal shopper and was reluctant to spend much on a frock she didn’t think she was likely to wear again. So she bought a pretty nightdress with long sleeves and a high neck and came to the party in that.

It had been damp and drizzly when we left, but the sun came out and it became a beautiful day. I remember we stopped and sat in a field, maybe we had a picnic. We arrived in Settle and asked directions from a middle-aged traffic warden with, unsurprisingly, a fine Yorkshire accent. He explained that we should turn at the Cenotaph – funny the details that you remember – I enjoyed the relish of the short ‘a’ in ‘Cenotaph’, while musing that, at home, we’d be much more likely to say ‘war memorial’. Because I remember this, I also remember the quiet appreciation with which he inoffensively eyed my cleavage.

We stopped at a pub with bedrooms to let advertised and a quite surprisingly camp young man showed us to an unsalubrious room. We made our excuses and left. We found another, much nicer place and booked in for the night.

The next morning, we did a tour of the local antique shops. The Sage bought several silver vesta cases. he was very pleased and said I was bringing him luck.

Later that day, he said in a casual way “You don’t mind if we go home by way of Bristol, do you? There’s a picture I want to look at.” I was a bit startled. Bristol is the other side of the country from Lowestoft and both are quite some way from Yorkshire. I couldn’t help wondering why we’d gone there – the Cotswolds or perhaps Wales might have been a more convenient choice. However, I didn’t mind and the next day we drove south-west.

There were posters up, advertising that weekend’s Cider Festival. It was mid-afternoon when we neared our destination and we started to look for a place to stay. There was not a room to be found. Everywhere had been booked for weeks. But I was to find out for the first time the full force of the Luck of the Sage. We stopped, unhopefully, at a charming little hotel by the bank of a pretty little river and went in to enquire. As we approached the desk, the proprietor, who was just dialling a number on the telephone, put the receiver down to answer our query. “I was just dialling the local Tourist Board,” he said, “to say that a party of three haven’t turned up, so I’ve got a double and a single room left.” He reckoned that they could be the only rooms unoccupied in the area. It was a small hotel, I can’t remember how many rooms, but two unoccupied when he had turned people away because of a prior booking can make a lot of difference to a small business. It’s no wonder that many hotels take a credit card when you book nowadays and charge for no-shows.

We had a drink in the bar before dinner and chatted to an elderly resident – a retired chap of military bearing who lived at the hotel all year round. In conversation to the hotelier later, we gained the impression that this was a mixed blessing.

The Sage had made an appointment to see the painting, which belonged to an elderly couple. They started off on the wrong foot, poor things, when they assumed I was his daughter, which probably stood him in good stead, for their embarrassment factor, when a price was being negotiated. However, he did a fair valuation – he’s an auctioneer, not a dealer, and doesn’t take advantage of lack of knowledge – but, when a price was agreed, they then produced an odd little oil painting of an old man sitting at a table counting his gold coins greedily. It put me in mind of Molière’s l’Avare, which I’d read the year before during my condensed French A Level course. The Sage didn’t want it, but they were insistent, and in the end he said that he could only offer them £5 which, to his embarrassment, they accepted. Later, he told me that he hadn’t been able to offer more or he wouldn’t have had enough money for petrol to get home! I expect the lovely little hotel had been quite expensive.

And that was my first honeymoon.

I’ll just go back briefly to January – there was a big art exhibition in London called Fanfare Into Europe, to commemorate Britain’s entry into the Common Market, as it was then called. The Sage and his friend Arthur, both very interested in pictures, decided to go and the Sage asked me if I’d like to come along – no ulterior motive, he was just being friendly. As I’ve said, he had been a good family friend for three years.

We got on really well and enjoyed the day, and next thing was, the Sage asked my mother if he could invite me out – he was being scrupulous here, not Victorian, as I was so much younger than him and he wouldn’t want to behave inappropriately. I have to say, he was a wonderful change from the boys I had dated before. I say “boys’ advisedly – although older than I, usually by about three years, he was the first man. And I was charmed to realise I was being courted. It wasn’t long before we were besotted with each other – but there was a clear background of knowing and liking each other as ‘just friends’, so agreeing to marry him three weeks later wasn’t quite as imprudent as it might seem. I wasn’t bothered by the age gap – my father had been 13 years older than my mother and I was a bit impatient of convention – and yet, not in the way that was fashionable then. I’d not have been tempted to go off and “find myself” on the hippy trail, for example – I thought that was nothing but taking part in the then fashionable stereotype and that it was more interesting to know who you were, or at least not bore the pants off everyone with the discovery.

I was an odd girl. And a bit intolerant, but honestly, the earnestness of it all, as each of them expounded on philosophy and self-knowledge and the rejection of their parents’ middle-class values, while accepting all the benefits of the middle-class lifestyle. I was already far too realistic for flower power.

Anyway, in mid-May, the wedding invitations had not yet gone out, and we rapidly decided to retain the reception, but to call it a Wedding Party (or something like that) instead, and changed the wording to invite people to a celebration of the marriage of… After all, the honeymoon was already booked and I’d made the cake.

My mother and I had already been to London in search of clothes and found nothing I liked. So we went off to Great Yarmouth and I shopped for all I wanted in a few hours. My wedding dress was short, yellow and white (big splodgy white flowers on a yellow background, I believe) with a big white collar and a deep V neck. I had an oatmeal-coloured coat. The dress cost £5 and the coat was quite cheap too.

And so we got married in Lowestoft Registry office, which is not the prettiest of places. The weather was overcast. My mother-in-law gave me a gold brooch in the shape of a dragonfly to wear on the coat. The Sage gave me a gold watch (which I still have, obviously) for a wedding present, and I gave him a portrait of myself – yes, honestly! – which I had painted by an artist and restorer who lived in Chedgrave,near Loddon. I wore my favourite evening dress, which was black velvet with a white collar – when added to my pensive expression, it looks like a portrait of a child in mourning! If you’ve been in my dining room (Blue Witch has, but I’m not sure that Dave has entered the room yet) it’s hanging on the wall there.

We were married on a Thursday – as the Sage was a partner in his firm, he didn’t need to ask for time off and it was not inconvenient for him to take a long weekend. Our honeymoon was booked for August, so we decided to have a few days in Yorkshire. Pa and Ma took my mother out for lunch, and we set off.

Roses wants the story in one go, but it can’t be done. I have delighted you for long enough already. Anyway, I’ve got to remember what happened next.

The next day, Mummy (indeed, childish perhaps but it’s what I called her) and I were invited over to Pa and Ma’s house – right here, where we live now, in fact. We had visited before, we were asked over every so often for tea or a meal, but things were rather different now. I began to realise quite quickly that I was marrying into a whole family. The Sprout had a brother and a sister; she was married with two children, and there were numerous cousins who lived locally. In our family, there was my mother, my sister and me.

We soon started to consider all the necessary details for a wedding – booking the church, wording the invitation, thinking about the guest list and where the reception was to be held. We wanted it to be at the Yacht Club, which had been the main venue of our social life for so many years (apart from friends’ houses and our own, of course). They hadn’t done a wedding reception before, but the managers, a married couple whose names I can’t remember right now, were very excited and pleased about the booking.

I was only 19 (sorry, that’s a song, isn’t it? Um, hang on … that’s right, it’s the Old 97’s – the apostrophe is in the name, it’s not my idea). “Nineteen is not the age of reason.” True, but I didn’t have any doubts about getting married, although I was quite alarmed by the planning. I left as much as possible to my mother and Ma. I elected to make my own wedding cake and my sister arranged to get it iced at a bakery in Loddon, near where she worked. As far as I was concerned, however, I just wanted to marry the Sprout and I didn’t see that it was anyone else’s business. I was extremely shy and hated the thought of being watched as I walked down the aisle. However, we went along with it all, and the Sprout and I spent as much time as possible with each other. He lived in a large, three-storeyed terraced house in South Lowestoft, not far from the seafront. It had been in a poor state of repair when he bought it and he’d knocked through the two main rooms on the ground floor and put an arch between them, and filled the walls with his painting collection – mostly 19th century landscapes and and Dutch seascapes. It was always very tidy, which made me think I’d have to buck up my casual ideas when I moved in.

After three months, the planning started to get to the Sage too. He came to me and said I’d been right to want a quiet wedding and did I still want that? I certainly did – and as for my mother, she’d said from the start that, if we wanted to elope, she’d hold the ladder. But what about his parents? They were rather more conventional, and they were the ones looking forward to all this. The Sage brightly suggested that we get married the next Friday, on the 25th May. They were going on holiday to Scotland that day, and we could follow them up and give them a splendid surprise.

I wasn’t convinced. A really bad shock, it seemed to me, and I didn’t want to start a relationship with my in-laws in that way. So, I said that he’d have to tell them, and we’d make the wedding on the 24th instead. That meant we could invite them (as I said yesterday, they’d not attended or known about their other son’s wedding, couldn’t do that to them twice). However, I drew the line at inviting anyone else but Mummy. I knew that the Sprout’s sister would insist on doing the whole confetti and tin can routine which I so hadn’t wanted in the first place. I told Wink about it, but explained why she couldn’t be there. She took it very well, considering.

The Sage went off to get a special licence and to tell his parents. My mother and I went to buy a wedding dress.

In the spirit of frivolity, I thought I’d tell you of when the Sage and I got married. I can’t remember how much I’ve said before about this, but since no one generally reads archives anyway (except Mago – but surely not of blogs?), not even I in my own blog, I’ll tell you anyway.

It’s about now*, 37 years ago, that we got engaged. We’d been to a picture exhibition in a gallery at Long Melford and presumably had dinner either when coming or going. We’d been seeing each other regularly for quite three weeks so had, both of us being astute judges of character and more impulsive than we looked, become decidedly smitten. We stopped for some conversation on the way home, in the course of which the Sage proposed.

Well, he said “Will you?” and stopped. And I said “Yes.” And he said “Will you?” and I said “yes”. Third time lucky and he managed to pop the question. And I said “yes.”

The next day was a Saturday and I went to work at the library, having arranged to meet each other in his office at lunch time. I didn’t say anything at work, being the subtle and secretive type. When I got there, he asked me if I’d like to choose an engagement ring or if I’d like a family ring. I’d always rather have antique than new, so I chose the latter, whereupon he produced a box from his pocket, that contained a Victorian sapphire and diamond ring which he put on my finger. It fitted perfectly.

Afterwards, I went back to work and still didn’t say anything, although after a while it was noticed…

Over lunchtime (I can’t remember if we went to the Yacht Club just opposite for lunch or if we just stayed and talked), we talked about getting married. He owned his own house, which simplified matters, and neither of us was in favour of a long engagement. I preferred a quiet, simple wedding as soon as possible – I saw no point in waiting. Rather like making the decision to have my new hip, when I phoned the doctor the next day, I see no point in waiting once the decision is made, unless it’s for a practical purpose. However, he was a bit worried about that. His brother had rather shocked their parents the previous year by suddenly getting married while travelling in Australia to a woman whom none of the family had met and about whom they’d heard little if anything, and he thought his mother should have an occasion to enjoy. We agreed that August would be a good month and it would be the full monty in church and all.

It was one brief anecdote I was going to tell you, of which I was reminded by the setting of tonight’s Antiques Roadshow in Bath. But now I’m putting it in context, I’ll inflict the whole story on you. Heh. It may take days.

* I’ve just looked up the dates for 1973. It was the 9th February when we became engaged. We’ve never marked it – we’re not too bothered about anniversaries.

It may give you an indication of how relaxed I am, that I have stopped wearing a wrist watch and I mislaid my diary for a fortnight and it didn’t bother me. I’m wearing no make-up and I often receive people in my pyjamas (I’m wearing the pyjamas, in case there is ambiguity there). It’s remarkable.

In some small defensive last stand, I might mention that they don’t much look like pyjamas, and the tops are actually long sleeved tee shirts. The trousers are plain and not overly baggy. I was quite startled, upon investigating M&S nightwear section, to discover the cost of the things – bottoms were around £20 for a plain cotton knit number, and the tops were £15. I went downstairs to the casual womenswear section and found that tee shirts were only £7, which leads me to suspect a rip-off somewhere. I’m not quite so far gone as to stay in the same garments night and day, by the way – I do change for bed.

The slight downside of having no diary meant that I was very pleased when two friends dropped in yesterday afternoon, and rather surprised when I found that they had come for a meeting that had, apparently, been arranged three weeks ago. A fourth arrived a few minutes later (I being number 3 of course) so we had our meeting with me reclining for my afternoon rest on the bed. Quite without shame. I’ll never live it down. Furthermore, the Sage and I have agreed that the bed will stay in the drawing room for another week. Heh. I love it, actually. It’s splendidly comfy and it’s lovely to go to sleep with a fire still flickering in the grate.

Weeza and family are coming over tomorrow. She is going to help us with the preparation of the catalogue for the next auction and Phil will look after Zerlina. He is planning to cycle over and meet them here. His idea of fun is not mine, I confess – he cycles some 15 miles a day as part of his commute (the middle section is by train) and he can think of little more enjoyable to do on a Sunday than cycle another 22. Well, presumably he’ll then bike home again, so 44 miles.

This evening, I finished the bottle of wine that I started on Tuesday. I’m glad to report that I feel no healthier for this relative abstinence. Glad, because it means that I don’t need to feel I have to remain at this frugal level in future.