How a chat with a child led to a 43rd anniversary

Dinosaurs. Planets. Two subjects that have fascinated kids for at least a couple of generations. What’s surprising is how impactful a conversation about either can turn out to be.

In my case the subject was the planets. I was in France and a nine-year-old boy, by curious coincidence sharing my name, David, visited the house where I was staying. We got into a chat about the solar system, and I ended up drawing a diagram with him showing all the planets, right out to Pluto – this was 1980 and we hadn’t yet learned to exclude Pluto from the list of true planets. 

How we thought of the planets in 1980

Please don’t think that the illustration here is a faithful copy of the diagram we produced back then. That’s long since been lost. This is a ChatGPT-generated reproduction, and far more sophisticated than anything either of us could have drawn. ChatGPT is just far too skilled (at least at this kind of thing) to lower itself to our level.

Still, unimpressive though our drawing was, it seems it impressed David enough for him to go home and tell his mother, Danielle, all about this curious Englishman he’d met. Curious enough to make her feel she’d like to see what he was like.

Jumping forward a couple of years, Danielle had thrown in her lot – and David’s – with mine and we were all three living together in England. Nor were we going to be just three for long. There came a dramatic day when I rang Danielle – from a public call box to a landline, you understand, mobiles still being a long way off – to tell her about some incident in my day that I obviously thought so important that I told her about it before she could give me her news, though now it seems so inconsequential, particularly compared to what she had to tell me, that I’ve forgotten all about it.

‘Don’t you want to hear my news, then?’ she asked. ‘About the result of the test?’

Memory flooded back. She’d been due to have a pregnancy test that morning. With the memory came certainty, given the solemnity with which she mentioned the test, about what its result had been.

‘It was positive,’ Danielle confirmed.

That was the starting pistol for a race. Those were the days of the Thatcher government, which had recently changed the laws concerning British nationality. If we were married, and the child was born in Britain, he or she would automatically inherit my nationality as well as Danielle’s, though I’d been born abroad (in Rome, since you ask) and Danielle was French. Otherwise, it would be down to the Home Secretary’s discretion. And I didn't know how discreet he was.

There was less of a practical consequence if the child was a girl. If however it was a boy and he received only French nationality from his mother, he would – as the law then stood – have been liable for military service in France when he turned 18. At the time, that represented 12 months out of a young man’s life which struck me as an appalling waste of time. Since there was no compulsory military service in Britain, getting him British citizenship would free him of tiresome obligation.

Shall I confess that I also rather liked the idea of my child sharing my nationality? I already shared a name with the lad who would become my stepson and, later on, precisely over the military service issue, would share a nationality with him too. I preferred it that my other children should not be technically foreigners to me.

Now, you may be thinking, ‘what was the problem? All you had to do was get married, right?’

Sadly, it wasn’t that simple. Danielle still had a husband back in France. As it happens, he was willing to grant a divorce, and there was no technical problem with getting an English divorce to a French marriage. There was just a linguistic one: her then husband spoke no English and the divorce papers would include no French.

He tried to be helpful. He signed the papers the court sent him on every page, but not in the one place where he had to, in the signature space. Danielle had to explain to him exactly where he had to sign and the court sent them back. By then time was getting very tight indeed. 

In the final stages of the exercise, the judge called Danielle, David and me in to see him in chambers. He checked with David that he was happy with the custody arrangements (term time with us, holidays with his dad); he said he was. The judge then looked at Danielle’s distended belly and said, ‘I expect you’d like me to reduce the delay between decree nisi and decree absolute’. 

Usually there’s a six-week gap between nisi and absolute, the provisional judgement for a divorce, and the definitive one that allows remarriage.

The judge reduced the time to one week.

As a result, when I started a new job on 4 January 1983, I had a request to make of my new boss.

‘I apologise for having to ask for a day off on the very day I’m starting work.’

His face fell. I could see him thinking, ‘What kind of guy have I taken on here?’

‘We’re about to have a baby and the only day my local registry office can marry us is 11 January, next Tuesday.’

He gave a roar of laughter and threw himself back in his chair.

‘David,’ he said, ‘there are few excuses I could have accepted, but that’s definitely one of them.’

So on Tuesday 11 January 1983, Danielle and I were married. And just eighteen days later, Michael was born – safely a British citizen – to join Danielle, David and me. 

incidentally, by the time Michael was eighteen, obligatory military service in France had been replaced by attendance at a one-day ‘citizen’s day' workshop.

Yesterday was 11 January 2026. Danielle and I joined a bunch of people with whom Danielle used to go out dragon-boating (check it out – it’s the Chinese answer to canoeing and good for health). They were there for their annual get-together.

Our 43rd wedding anniversary became a subsidiary factor in the general good cheer.

Celebrating our 43rd

We promised them all invitations to our golden wedding anniversary. We just have to survive another seven years. We’ll give it our best shot.

In the meantime, isn’t it fun to see where a casual chat about the planets can lead?

Grandparenting: when Matilda gave me an art lesson

On my latest visit to her house, there came a moment when Matilda, my five-year-old granddaughter, thrust an etch-a-sketch at me and said, ‘what should I draw?’

Like an idiot, I said, ‘a horse’.

The look she gave me conveyed many things, but enthusiasm wasn’t one of them.

My suggestion had been obviously crazy. Far too difficult. Nervously I racked my mind for some easier alternative.

‘What about a house?’

Odd, isn’t it? Change one letter and a challenging drawing option turns into an elementary one. I always find that kind of linguistic oddity amusing.

‘A house?’ said Matilda, now with a smile. And got drawing.

What I was expecting was a box with the top split to form something like a roof, two windows as though they were eyes and a tall rectangle as a door, in the position of a mouth. Or possibly a nose. To complete the picture, there might be a chimney at the top with a spiral of smoke coming out of it.

A House. As one might expect a five-year-old to draw it

What I got was different.

A House. As Etch-a-Sketched by Matilda

Not everybody agrees on what we’re looking at here.

Matilda’s uncle, my middle son Michael, assures me that what I see as a bed inside the house is in fact a pair of steps leading to a door. That strikes me as far-fetched. Or should I say far-sketched?

Matilda’s grandmother Danielle agrees with me that it’s a bed, with a pillow at one end and someone’s head lying on it. However Danielle qualifies her view: ‘but it would be a cut-off head’.

It’s true that the head looks a bit bodiless. It may well be this apparent decapitation that led to Matilda herself being dissatisfied with the picture. ‘My drawing’s bad,’ she assured me, before deleting it. A deletion which suggests that she hadn’t spotted me making a more permanent record of it on my phone.

Why did I take a photograph of her drawing? 

Because I was impressed that, the way I interpret it, what she’d chosen to show was something from inside the house rather than a dull exterior. She’d presented the life within and not just the structure without. In other words, more than a house, she’d drawn a home.

I think that’s impressive.

Obviously, I could check out whether she agrees with my interpretation. ‘You could always ask her what she drew,’ Michael urges me. 

He’s right, of course. But I’m not sure she’d tell me. And I’m not sure I want to know anyway. I rather like the uncertainty. Is it just a door? Is it a decapitated individual in a bed? Or is it just someone lying down to rest from the stress of outside life?

I don’t know and I like it that way. It means we can choose our own interpretation. And that strikes me as the richness of art.

Postscript

Talking about art, here’s another Matilda story.

The most celebrated painter from Valencia, where we now live, is Joaquín Sorolla. Why, the main station, to which I’m heading today after my visit to Matilda and Elliott, is even called after him. No year seems to go by without some new Sorolla exhibition in the city, if not two or three, and the top floor of the  Museum of Fine Arts is dedicated to Sorolla and his contemporaries.

Among the paintings by Sorolla’s contemporaries on show is one that always gets me smiling. It’s called La Mosca, The Fly, and it was painted in 1897 by the artist Cecilio Pla. A commentator I’ve read calls the smile in the painting ‘contagious’, which is just how it feels to me. 

La Mosca by Cecilio Pla

I find the work playful, humorous, and quite simply fun.

Now in Matilda’s parents’ kitchen the curtains, though I suspect of a slightly less expensive fabric than in the house of a late nineteenth-century upper-middle-class family, nonetheless make me think of the painting. So for a while now I’ve been trying to get Matilda to emulate the whimsical pose of the painting in her own kitchen. On this visit, I was finally able to do so. 

The result was at least as playful, humorous and fun as Pla’s piece. Though with a distinctively Matilda touch to it. Apparently, it didn’t occur to Pla to have his model stick out her tongue – that was all Matilda. 

But, hey, doesn’t that just make it all the more playful?

Matilda as La Mosca, by me

Grandparenting summer

It’s been a good summer, enriched by some immersion grandparenting.

That included two short experiments that together represented a big step forward in our grandparenting practice. Twice over the summer, the grandkids stayed with us for two nights, without their parents. And it worked out well. On each occasion, there was one night when Elliott woke up and demanded attention, but not for too long either time. On the other night of each stay, both kids slept right through. 

The time will come when they can stay with us for a longer period, giving their parents a break and, who knows, maybe even allowing us to take them on holiday somewhere. Perhaps to France. They both hold French nationality and, in a statement of surprising understanding, Matilda has let us know she wants to be better acquainted with the country and its language. When Danielle and I first met, it was French that we spoke to each other, and occasionally we fall into it again.

“Why are you speaking French?” Matilda often challenges us if she hears it.

It impresses me that she even recognises the language. And I can’t help feeling that behind her comment lies the implication, “I don’t want to be left out, I want to understand”. We’ll have to see what we can do when she’s a little older.

Matilda on her pedal bike
You think she doesn’t look happy? She wasn’t.
Her words after I took this picture were, “I don’t want photos.”

The big thing this summer has been the bikes. As I explained before, Matilda received her first pedal bike for her birthday in August. It’s quite clear that using a balance bike, the kind that has kids pushing themselves along with their feet on the ground, teaches them how to cycle much more effectively than using a pedal bike with training wheels. That was certainly clear when I saw her last week, at her home in Hoyo de Manzanares, near Madrid. She’s mastered both getting started (while with us, she still needed a push) and stopping (she now uses a brake and gets her feet on the ground, instead of falling over pretty much every time she came to a halt). And, boy, does she get some speed up in between.

Matilda running on the rocks outside her school

“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

The real problem is that Elliott, who has always wanted to do anything that Matilda could do, at the same time as she learned to do it – walking, running, talking – naturally wants to use a pedal bike too, even though he isn’t quite two and a half years old yet. His dad bought one for him, but he bought it from someone near us in Valencia, and it’s at our place until we find a way of getting it to him. In the meantime, Elliott has to beg his sister for some time to use her bike. When he does get to use it, he’s quite remarkable – I timed him keeping going for ten or fifteen minutes. That may be partly because he hasn’t yet fully mastered stopping, but it’s still remarkable.

Matilda’s pedal bike
“Me too, me too,” says Elliott

Language is the other area where the kids have bowled me over. Their mastery of Spanish can only leave me consumed by envy. But their English also just gets better and better, not just in the words but in the thinking behind them. 

“I like coming to Valencia,” Matilda told me.

I felt quite flattered, a feeling that lasted only until she could finish her remark.

“Because,” she went on, “we get ice cream every day here.”

There was ice cream on only one occasion last week, when I was with them. That’s ‘parents’ rules’. Sheena, my daughter-in-law, tells me that she regards us as applying ‘grandparents’ rules’. The latter are seriously more grandchild indulgent (and possibly grandparent-peace-purchasing).

The other enjoyable thing about being in our place is that they get to see trains going by from time to time. They call each one they see a ‘chu-chu-bahnele’, which is the equivalent in Danielle’s mother tongue, Alsatian, of what we might call a choo-choo-train. 

For the avoidance of confusion, Alsatian in this context has nothing to do with a breed of dogs, and everything to do with the language spoken in Danielle’s birth region of Alsace, in Eastern France.

Why do I find the use of Alsatian so enjoyable? Because it was what Danielle used when pointing out trains to our kids, when they were of that age. And she used it with our friends’ kids too. 

Now Elliott will cry out “chu-chu-bahnele” whenever we see so much as the railway track (well, strictly speaking it’s a metro track, but it feels like a railway since it’s all above ground near where we live. He doesn’t make the distinction, so nor do we). 

As it happens, with him the fascination seems to be just part of a general interest in alternative means of travel to cars.

“Plane! Plane!” he’ll say whenever he sees or hears one passing overhead.

They’re both beginning to grasp some of the subtler distinctions of language. For instance, they never want anything. They always need it. After all, a want can be denied. But a need? Well, it just has to be satisfied, doesn’t it? 

That slippage between terms, by the way, is by no means limited to children.

Chupa chups, as they call them, or lollipops as I would, are the object of one of those needs. Fulfilled, it creates considerable delight. It was, on one occasion, even under parents’ rules, in Hoyo, while I was there. 

Chupa chup moment, with Michael-Michael
After Edward Hopper

The event gave me the opportunity to take a photo of them in pensive enjoyment of their Chupa chup moment, along with a highly welcome visitor, their Uncle Michael. Or Michael-Michael, as they continue to call him. The moment with him and their chupa-chups gave me the opportunity to take a photo I felt had a bit of the wistful, enigmatic mood of an Edward Hopper painting to it.

The moment also has rarity value. A visit by Michael-Michael is received with such unconfined joy that, as a rule, we would certainly not apply words like peaceful to the scene that ensues.

High delight - literally, too - when Michael-Michael visits

And there were other special moments for the kids in the course of the summer. Their Granny flew down to join us from her home in Belfast, in Northern Ireland.

Matilda enjoying her granny’s presence

It was with their granny that they got to satisfy yet another need, the well-known requirement of the human soul to bathe from time to time in foam. A fine way to spend a little time on a hot summer day. As Granny can testify.

Matilda revelling in the foam

Granny can testify to the enjoyment

The heat, of course, was one of the major aspects of the summer, with global warming seeming to go right on in its inexorable way. That, I’m sure, was one of the things that made the foam so welcome, just like the swimming pool and the sea. And the pleasure the kids took in all three made it all the more bearable for us too.

A fine summer, as I said, despite the heat. The kind that leaves lots of great memories. All of which makes for what we’d call a good time all round, doesn’t it?

A rare moment of peace in an action-packed summer

Canny canines and humble humans

It’s always good to have family come to visit.

The poodles like it too. Each in her own way. When my son Michael and our daughter-out-law Raquel first turned up, Toffee went wild with delight. She recognised them at once, despite not having seen them for months, and she was ecstatic at seeing them again. She danced around them and kept trying to leap up and lick their faces which, considering she barely comes to their knees, was an ambitious endeavour.

Luci in front, Toffee behind, in the woods near our house

Luci was more circumspect. She barked at them as she does at all strangers who have the gall to enter her house, at least until they’ve spent twenty minutes there and she gets used to their presence. But her heart wasn’t really in the barking on this occasion. It was obvious she too was impressed by the rapture being displayed by Toffee and must have been asking herself, “if she’s that enthusiastic about them, perhaps I shouldn’t be too concerned. Especially as they don’t seem completely unfamiliar to me.”

Things quickly settled down and everybody got used to everybody else. In fact, they were particularly affectionate to Raquel, with the unerring instinct of any animal to make straight for the one person who is allergic to them. I can only congratulate Raquel on how obvious she made it to them that she returned that affection, and simply coped with the asthma and general discomfort they inflicted on her.

She’s had to head home, but Michael stayed with us. In fact, he took charge of the place while we were out, and kindly even gave the dogs a walk. And not just along the patch of green at the back of the house, but into the nearby woods which are one of the major attractions to living here.

Funnily enough, while Danielle is able to inspire them with enthusiasm for a walk in those woods, and they’re always keen if a whole group of us accompanies them, if it’s just me or just Michael, the dogs seem reluctant to go very far. Take them off the lead too soon, and there’s a risk they’ll make a beeline for home.

It’s not something that I’ve worked out. Maybe they like being out with a group because it feels like a genuine pack, whereas just three of us leave them feeling far too isolated. Unless Danielle is one of those present, since she has about her that air of quiet mastery that inspires confidence in all around, canine or human.

My technique is to keep them on the lead for rather longer than Danielle does. I release them only when it’s clear to them that we’re having the walk whether they like it or not. I have to say that they give every sign of enjoying themselves for the rest of the walk, although I notice that they only really get out in front of me when we’ve turned unmistakably for home. Maybe just because they’d rather get safely back to Danielle as quickly as possible.

Michael used all these traits to good effect when he took them out alone. He doesn’t know the woods particularly well. He therefore kept the dogs on their leads for a while and systematically went the opposite way from where they were trying to pull him. Once he’d decided that they’d gone far enough, he took them off their leads and simply followed them back, getting safely out of the woods.

“At path intersections, they’d stop and look at me to decide where to go,” he told me, “but since they always stopped at the entrance of the path they obviously wanted to take, I simply went that way.”

The technique apparently worked splendidly. They got home without difficulties, having all had a pleasant and relaxing walk.

Which just goes to show how effective it was for all concerned that, having established his leadership, Michael could then let his followers have their own way. Lead then listen? That sounds like a message it would be good to apply more frequently, even outside the limited sphere of dog walking.

Dates

By ‘dates’, I don’t mean the kind of meetings that people have which may lead to a romantic entanglement. Nor do I mean the fruit that grows on palm trees. No, I’m talking about a number of key moments in my life that have fundamentally moulded its shape and direction.

The first of these I can’t even specify exactly. It was some time in September 1981. Staying with friends in Eastern France, I met a nine-year old boy with whom I got chatting about the solar system. As one does. We even drew ourselves a diagram of the planets circling the sun, naming each of them.

One of the odder aspects of this meeting was that we shared a first name. That was unusual for France, where ‘David’ is mostly a name used by Jews though I, from England, where the name is far more common, was the Jew and he wasn’t.

They say that the quickest way to a woman’s heart is through her child, and it certainly worked in this case. David’s mother is Danielle and, 38 years on, our marriage has lasted since 11 January 1983.

The second date was 29 January 1983. That was the day David’s first half-brother, Michael, was born. If you’ve just compared those two dates, yes, there wasn’t much of a gap between Danielle and I getting arrived and Michael being born. 18 days, in fact. Danielle had to get divorced first. The judge who saw us commented, looking at her belly, that we would probably want him to reduce the time between decree nisi – the first stage of divorce – and decree absolute, the final stage after which one can marry – to the shortest possible time.

Michael deeply appreciative of my show of fatherly affection

He was right. At the time, there was no guarantee that the child (we didn’t know Michael’s sex before he was born) would inherit my British nationality if we weren’t already married. That was important if it was indeed a boy, since the French still had compulsory military service, a horrible waste of nearly a year, while the British didn’t. We did just manage to get married on time, sparing him that terrible fate. As it happened, however, the French had done away with military service by the time he reached eighteen.

Not that we regret having got married for all that.

The third date was 27 July 1984. That was when David’s and Michael’s brother Nicky was born. That completed that generation of our family.

Anyone who thinks that having a child doesn’t change your life clearly hasn’t had one. I always joke to new parents that they only have 25 years of anxiety ahead of them, but the real joke is that it isn’t a joke at all. There was a time when I was out every night at 2:00 in the morning walking around the estate where we lived, with Michael on my shoulders, while I pointed out various items of interest: the hedge, the lawn, the tree, the moon, all in the hope that he might eventually fall asleep.

Nicky was far less of a problem in the early years but developed a fairly rebellious character later. Somewhere, I still have the Post-It note from him, announcing that he was leaving us for ever, because he was sick of being treated unfairly, and he didn’t care how much we might be worried about his disappearance. And that was one of the lesser crises in our relationship.

One aspect of his rebellion that I particularly liked, however, was that he decided to grow his hair long. His brother followed suit. But when Michael changed his mind and had it cut short, Nicky stuck to his principles and kept it long. That meant that for years he’d be taken for a girl, right into adolescence when the loss of his childish looks left no one in any doubt that he was male, long hair or not.

What has never ceased to astonish me is that while most kids would resent having their gender mistaken, Nicky simply took it in his stride. When waiters in France asked “et pour Mademoiselle?” he would simply give his order, feeling it entirely unnecessary to correct their misapprehension.

And what of David in all this? Well, he’d grown from being “little David” until he stood significantly taller than me. Switching the names around seemed inappropriate, and “young David” as opposed to “old David” wasn’t an attractive option. As a result, he became Davide (pronounced like the French David, roughly Daveed in English), which he remains to this day.

He was an extraordinary asset, right up to the time he left for university. He was the best kind of big brother, so we could leave him in charge whenever we chose to go out, and it created a great relationship that has lasted to this day between the three brothers. On the other hand, in a moment of injustice towards him, we took a gift of our first ever dishwasher from my mother just three or for months before he moved out. So, for pretty much eight years, he had to do a colossal amount of washing up, and only got to enjoy a few months of a dishwasher before he left the household.

The next date of note was 11 January 2005. Now, if you remember the dates from the start of this piece, you’ll have recognised that date as Danielle’s 22nd wedding anniversary (by curious coincidence, mine too). Ironically, Danielle managed to forget that date every single year, rather refuting the common belief that it’s husbands who forget. A boss of mine once told me that the sure way not to forget your wedding anniversary was to forget it once. In my experience, I would turn up each year with a bunch of flowers and Danielle would say, “Oh, lovely! Is it our that time of year again, then?”

David(e) like to take a balanced approach towards parenting

Well, since 2005 she’s never forgotten. Why? Because our first grandchild was born on the day of our anniversary in that year. Thanks to Senada, his wife, and David, we’ve enjoyed the company of Aya for the last fourteen – now nearly fifteen – years. 

David(e), Senada and Aya
Enjoying the pleasures of Valencia, though not its best weather

She’s reached that painful stage where she has answers for all my wit (I think she regards most of it as little more than half-wit), and as often as not, she’s not just giving as good as she gets, but rather better (not an admission I find it easy to make…)

Nicky with Matilda

And the final date in this glorious list? Well, it’s Sunday, 18 August 2019. The previous evening, we had a text message, “Sheena’s waters have broken”. Twenty-four hours later, we’d dumped the dogs with our friend Begonia, who is always threatening to dogknap them anyway, and driven to the hospital in Madrid. It was great to see our second grandchild Matilda on the very day of her birth.

Sheena entertaining her new child's grandfather

David, Senada and Aya are travelling soon to see her. Michael, with our daughter-out-law Raquel, live in Madrid too so they’ve seen her many times already. And we, of course, have been up several times.

Danielle appreciating Raquel's display of daughter-out-law's affection

The next occasion will be the end of this month. I’ll be in Madrid to say goodbye to the company that has just decided to let me go (curious expression, that, “let me go”: I wasn’t trying to escape). I have to admit that seeing Matilda will go a long way towards making me feel less annoyed by the redundancy. Particularly as she’s learned to smile since last time I saw her.

Matilda's now smiling

And isn’t that what family’s for? Infuriating they sometimes may be, but overall family members are what make even annoying moments pleasurable.

Which is why those six dates matter so much to me…

Wedding in the hills

What a weekend! What a visit! And what a day!

Hatch, match and despatch. These are often said to be the only functions of an Anglican priest these days – performing christenings, weddings and funerals. I suspect there are clerics of other faiths of whom the same could be said.

I’m now of what we like to call a certain age.

Isn’t that an odd expression? I was pretty certain of my age when I was twenty-eight. Even more certain when I was eight and birthdays still came around far too slowly. In fact, if ever I’ve been uncertain of my age, it is now, when I frequently find myself having to subtract one date from another, a task made more awkward because I have nothing like enough fingers.

Still, a certain age, in the sense of an advanced age, is what I’ve now attained. An age where ‘despatch’ is more common than the other two. Most recently, it was my mother’s funeral. Marriages? Births? In the past for many of my contemporaries.

But then, suddenly, that changed. After all, there are our kids. And not before time, as it happens. My youngest son, Nicky, is 34. But he’s finally taken the plunge, and with a remarkably charming woman. Sheena and he are clearly made for each other, similar where they need to be, and where they’re not, wholly complementary.

So this weekend we were at their ‘matching’ ceremony.

And, boy, did they handle it well. They both live in Madrid (yes, there’s something special about an Irishwoman and an Englishman hooking up in the Spanish capital).

They arranged their wedding in the Sierra, the mountains, outside Madrid. The village was Santa Maria de la Alameda, at nearly 1500 metres, with a permanent population of 40, so the wedding guests tripled the number of inhabitants.

Last moments of bachelor life for Nicky and Sheena

The mayor conducted the service outside a house in which some of the more discerning guests stayed. By discerning I mean ‘of a certain age’. We were the ones who weren’t planning on dancing from the late – extremely late – dinner through to breakfast. It was good to have a place to retreat to well away from the sounds of revelry, where I use the word ‘sounds’ loosely – I suspect the neighbours might have chosen something a little more ferocious, such as ‘noise’ or ‘din’.

Happy couple in a glorious setting

The ceremony was touching. The bride was greeted by one of her favourite songs, played by a band of friends including the groom on guitar. The setting was stunning, flooded with sunlight and with a ring of hills in the background. And the mayor conducted the ceremony with charm and good humour. In particular, she made a point of welcoming the guests who came from France, the United Kingdom, Italy and other parts of Europe, and even from Australia and California (she did say California and not the United States, but I suspect that many of the inhabitants of that fine State would also prefer to make that distinction).

‘Nice of her to be so welcoming of foreigners,’ I told the old friend who was standing next to me.

Well, she’s a young friend, but she’s been a friend a long time. Nicky’s first girlfriend, making it all the more gratifying that she (and her boyfriend) danced at his wedding.

As it happens, she’s also pretty acute.

‘I’m not sure we’d be quite so welcome had we been from Tanzania,’ she whispered back to me.

I’m sure she was right, but as things were, the ceremony went smoothly and pleasantly and satisfied everyone.

That was the tone of the whole weekend. I know Sheena in particular, but Nicky too, invested great effort in organising the entire occasion. And not just them: it was impressive to see how many friends were helping with flowers and decorations, with organising events and helping guests to their bedrooms, with making sure the speeches were given in the right order by the designated speakers, with delivering the right people to the right place at the right time in the right clothes – even, I kid you not, with their hair in the right state (two friends helped get Nicky’s hair just right – and it was; I know Sheena could count on all the help she needed too).

The event proved how right they all were: as always happens when preparations are well directed, there was no sign of the effort, but simply a sense that everything worked precisely as it should, in apparent effortlessness.

Among other things, I was astonished by the meals. On the wedding day, there was a meal referred to as breakfast, but which went on until late morning. There were only crisps and drinks at the time I associate with the idea of lunch. But by 3:00 we were gathering for what was called ‘cocktails’ which seemed to be snacks without drinks though, confusingly, drinks were also available (but not cocktails).

That led without apparent break to what they called lunch, and we in England inexplicably call the wedding breakfast. It lasted into the evening, merging into what I like to think of as dinnertime though in Spain, that doesn’t start until 10:00. At which point they served us some other meal for which I can’t think of a name, but which turned out to be as enjoyable as all the others, so I didn’t complain.

My impression is that from about 3:00 onwards, barely a minute passed when food wasn’t being served. We certainly didn’t go hungry over the weekend.

Or, as it happens, thirsty either.

The entire wedding weekend left me with a feeling for which the word ‘blissful’ doesn’t seem too strong. That appeared to be a general sentiment amongst the guests. As you can imagine, this has left me with something of a taste for such ‘match’ ceremonies. 

You may have noticed that I mentioned this was my youngest son’s wedding. My eldest son has been married for some time. This rather leaves Michael, the middle son, to titillate expectations. And since he was accompanied by Raquel, a young woman as charming as Sheena and as well-suited to him as Sheena is to Nicky, those expectations have been well titillated.

Michael and Raquel at one of the meals.
No idea what to call it. It happened some time between 3:00 and midnight

Who knows? If he (and she) can provide us with another such occasion in the near future, they’ll receive no objection from me.

And, of course, I haven’t forgotten that ‘hatch’ sometimes follows ‘match’. After such a spectacular wedding weekend, who knows whether we might not be celebrating a new arrival some time soon.

Something else I’d certainly be entirely up for.

The poignancy of memory

I keep on working through my old photos, a process constantly slowed down by the reawakening of memories of moments long past, of people long missed and of events long gone.

There was a morning in 1982 when Danielle announced to me that she really ought to have a pregnancy test. By the time the afternoon was nearing its end, I’d forgotten all about it and when I rang her I began talking about all sort of indifferent matters. Eventually she interrupted me:

‘Don’t you want to hear about the test?’

I managed to bite off the words ‘what test?’ and simply answered, ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ although her tone of voice made it fairly clear what the result had been.

‘Positive,’ she told me.

It wasn’t a shock but it certainly was an overwhelming piece of news. The kind that you know at once is going to leave absolutely nothing the same. And, from this first intimation of his arrival, I have to say that Michael has affected the nature of my life pretty fundamentally ever since (aided and, I like to think, abetted by the arrival of his brother Nicky just eighteen months after him).

One of the first things we had to do was get married. I appreciate that these days it’s far from unusual to have a child outside marriage, but this was 1982 and the dear, sainted Maggie was Prime Minister and making it ever more difficult to acquire British citizenship. We didn’t know the sex of the child at that time. The problem would arise if it was a boy, as indeed turned out to be the case: the French still imposed on young men that ghastly waste of time known as military service and if the child was born, even in England, he wouldn’t inherit British nationality from me – and therefore the escape card from the French military – unless I was married to Danielle first.

As it happens, by the time he turned eighteen French military service had been reduced to a day and he did it anyway. Though it turned out to be as complex as getting married had proved nearly nineteen years earlier. Which is another memory that brings me great pleasure...

So we didn’t actually need to get married, although I’m not at all sorry we did, 36 years on…

The problem with getting married was that Danielle needed a divorce first. You know the Oscar Wilde saying about a second marriage proving the triumph of hope over experience? Danielle was about to demonstrate it.

Her first husband made no problem about the divorce but he spoke no English and all the documents were in that language. It proved difficult to get him to sign in the right place, but eventually he did. We were married on 11 January 1983 and Michael was born on the 29th, so it was a close-run thing.

Incidentally, thereafter I became the specialist in remembering our anniversary, Danielle in forgetting it. That lasted until 2005 when our first grandchild – Aya – was born to my stepson David and his wife Senada also on 11 January. Danielle’s never forgotten Aya’s birthday so she now remembers our anniversary too.

It was a small wedding organised in a hurry. We had some close friends and family there and naturally took photos of them.

Leonard, my father, to the left in his trademark black tie
Alasdhair to the right, in a far-from-trademark beard
The smiles reflect their personalities...

The one I came across the other day was of my father and my old friend Alasdhair. My father was a man of extraordinary gentleness as well as courage and he was an inspiring presence in my life. Alasdhair I had met when we were both 13 and we had remained close through our school days and university. Later, he moved to the US but we kept in contact all the same, seeing each other from time to time but, above all, each remaining a constant known presence in the life of the other.

The photo therefore represents some precious memories to me.

But they are poignant too. My father lived only just over four more months after that picture was taken. Alasdhair did better but succumbed, to cancer, just over two years ago.

The joy is tinged with sadness. I suppose that’s what the passage of 36 years is bound to bring. But the pleasure of finding the photo was undiminished for all that.

Older so younger

“The photograph is younger,” says one of the characters in Tom Stoppard’s Professional Foul, to which another replies “it must be an old photograph… How odd… Young therefore old. Old therefore young. Only odd at first glance. The second glance is called linguistic analysis.”

One of the things we discovered while we were clearing out our former flat in Kehl, in Germany, was the huge collection of photographs we’d never weeded, let alone sorted or mounted anywhere. A lot of them are old. And therefore young. Which is odd if you’re not into linguistic analysis.

One of them in particular brought me up short. 

Was I ever so young? Were they?
Ah, the joys of an old photograph

My first thought was to wonder whether I was ever so young.  Which is another odd thought, isn’t it? After all, I remember having been a kid. But, hey, this all about that kind of oddness.

At the time I didn’t think of myself as that young. Those two lads, real bundles of fun except when they were real bundles of exasperation, also marked a rite of passage for me. With the arrival of the first of them, it was finally borne in on me, conclusively and undeniably, that I was no longer part of the younger generation. I’d had a stepson for a couple of years by then, but here were two members of a generation younger than mine to whose existence I’d actually contributed (or so my wife assured me, at least).

It was not before time, I have to admit. I was thirty when my first son was born and should already have reconciled myself to being inexorably moving towards middle age. But it took the actual arrival of my kids to bring the truth home to me.

Being reminded of all that by the photo came as a surprise, but by no means an unpleasant one.

But what was most striking about was the arithmetic I soon enough started doing.

That young man who didn’t think of himself as young, has long since stopped being young at all. Long, long since. I’ve lived more than as long again as I’d lived at the time the photo was taken.

As for the two lads – why, they’re 35 and 33 today. Which makes them just older than I was in that photograph.

All very odd. And nothing to do with linguistic analysis. Just with the passage of time and the formation of old, old memories.

Pleasantly brought back by the discovery of an old photograph.