My wedding ring has taken a bit of stick since I first started wearing it. I hardly ever take it off so it's regularly plunged into detergent and bleach, is often clogged with dough and pastry and frequently coated in handcream. I chose this particular ring because, unusual at the time, it's made from three different colours of gold and has an engraved pattern though this has worn away over the years. Over rather a lot of years, looking at today's date.
We don't do anything special to celebrate our anniversaries. Actually, we don't do anything. It hasn't even been mentioned and I doubt the mister is even aware of the significance of the third day in July. He's not the sort of bloke who comes home with surprise flowers or boxes of Thornton's Continentals. Or anything. Ever. He's even forgotten my birthday on occasion. Come to think of it, we only tied the knot because a couple of our friends who had just had their wedding suggested we might do the same. Certainly, I was never proposed to. We'd returned to our home town and our respective parents after three years away at university and it, well, it just sort of happened.
There was no big 'do'. I made my outfit (a short sleeved, no fasteners, no zip, tunic style top and skirt or 'two piece' as my mum would say), with some fabric my brother paid for and sewn on an old Singer hand machine, with my dad turning the handle. I didn't make the flowery shirt (or more accurately 'blouse' ) which I wore underneath. Oh no, that was out of my cousin's Grattan catalogue which I paid for weekly. Along with the dress my mum wore. The mister had a suit made by Burtons the tailors. We weren't convinced that it was made to measure. He's very tall and it was clearly intended for a very tall and exceedingly wide man. The jacket fit where it touched and the second trouser leg was superfluous. He could easily have fitted into just one.
We didn't bother with a photographer and there are only a few snaps of the day as my brother hadn't quite worked out how to operate his new camera. ('I could have painted a bloody portrait in the time it's taken him to take a bloody picture' my dad was heard to mutter.) Or flowers. That is until Aunty M left us in no doubt what she thought about that (after she'd closely inspected the stitching on the hem of my skirt, of course) which meant me and my dad had to cut roses from the one bush in the garden, wrapping them in kitchen foil before dishing them out with pins from my mum's sewing box (which was actually a sandwich tin from a picnic set but that's another story). Pity they wilted so quickly after all that effort.
We hadn't bothered to order taxis, either, so there was a short ride in my friends' clapped out Fiat (to be fair, it only broke down once) to the local register office and an equally short ceremony (good job, really, as brides were queuing outside. July 3rd was clearly popular that year). Immediately afterwards my friend greeted us with 'Three minutes to get into, three years to get out of'. The same friend who'd nudged us into the whole marriage thing. The same friend who had given me a copy of Anna Karenina as a wedding present. Writing this all these years later, I'm now wondering if she was trying to tell me something.
The reception was a buffet in the pub down the road (which in later years was closed down for drug dealing but, honestly, it was quite respectable when my family and friends congregated there). My dad made a fruit cake which the woman who lived over the road from us iced. She also stuck on some little cherubs made out of silver paper which looked a bit out of place amongst the sausage rolls and pickled onions but still, it was a nice gesture and she didn't charge extra for them. Everyone then went to the working men's social club for more beer and a game of bingo (well, it was a Saturday and that's what my relatives did). Nobody won or if they did they didn't tell us. By then we were heading for Edinburgh, en route to Pitlochry where we'd be spending a week in a farmer's field.
So, here we are, so very many years, two kids and a Boo later.
And with only slightly less dodgy hairstyles.