Today
Becky and I are steadily working through what's needed to organise her wedding day later this year. Once this particular machine gets started, there are a number of assumptions made about the rituals surrounding it. People talk about bouquets, veils, bridesmaids, speeches and matching waistcoats as though the marriage couldn't be solemnised without these things.
One thing that we are unsure about is the value of a wedding cake. At many of the recent weddings that I have attended, the cake-cutting has been a sort of non-event, its significance rather lost. People are less fond of fruit cake than they used to be, but other sorts of cake don't keep too well, so that sending a piece to Auntie in Canada isn't an option. And to make a pile of cupcakes seems to be missing the point.
So, right now, wedding cake may be off the agenda.
In My Day
My wedding day has been the subject of this blog before, but planning Becky's has caused me to think about how small our expectations were when we got married. Getting to the register office was challenging enough. We hoped that our very nearest and dearest would be able to make it and were not at all put out by the unexpected addition of Keir and his family. The little feast we'd prepared was just stretched to include them. I think that there were about twenty people at our wedding.
But we did have a cake. This was a complete surprise. Paul's mother had made it, probably using her infamous "bung-in" recipe and his dad had done a magnificent job of icing it.
Since we had given everyone less than two weeks' notice of our impending nuptials, this was indeed an achievement and was accepted as a gift of the most loving kind. Looking at that picture makes me wonder what kind of knife we were using. Certainly not a proper cake knife.
What with the champagne that Chris supplied and the flowers both families brought (sweets peas, all of them - how weird is that?) we managed to fit in a number of rituals into our impromptu wedding.
And the marriage has been none the worse for that.
Today
I've just returned from my annual weekend with the Laetare Singers at Halsway Manor in the Quantocks. There are quite a lot of people there - about sixty - so they take some getting to know. I've developed a fairly jolly persona for this sort of occasion, but that doesn't always help me in understanding people.
Nor, if I'm honest, in their getting to know me.
In My Day
People who know me now are very surprised when I say that I have in the past been rather shy. My upbringing, with its emphasis on family, meant that I was unskilled in dealing with random social contacts.
While I enjoyed parties, I also found it very hard to be relaxed, to be "me" and to find out anything about other people. Parties were often it seemed, when looking back, ordeals to be endured where everyone but me knew the rules.
Sometime in my mid-twenties I decided this had to stop. People, after all, might be interesting, if only I had the courage to approach them. We went to a fair number of parties and I simply starting talking to folk; asking them what they did, how they knew the host etc etc. Somewhat to my surprise, I found that people responded and I began to enjoy these transitory social contacts.
A family joke soon arose; that at any given party I could be found with a group of people around me, hanging on my every word. I don't know how true that is, but given my earlier awkwardness, I guess it's more of a compliment than otherwise.
At family events, such as weddings, I now deliberately approach members of the new family to find out more. This has resulted in new friendships, new insights and a greater sense of belonging.
Talking to a friend this weekend about someone with whom I had only recently learnt to connect, I said "It took me a while to get their measure..." After a pause, "and, I suppose for them to get mine".
Quite.
Today
On Women's Hour today there was a discussion about parents having favourites among their children. There was much said about the effects on both the favoured and the unfavoured and on the duty that parents have to restrain themselves from expressing their preference and learning to love all equally.
Sometimes, from an outsider's point of view, it's easy to think that you can see that a particular child is favoured but all may not be as it seems.
In My Day
Mamma was never one to avoid speaking a truth, however much it might take your breath away. She used to talk about how much Chris, born twenty months after David, used to cry. "It was because I was so wrapped up with David," she would say "He was jealous."
Later this changed. David spent much of his childhood at boarding school and Chris became the golden child. He and Mamma had much in common and Mamma freely admitted that if she had to choose whom to support between Daddy and Chris there was no contest; Chris won every time.
Later, when I was approaching thirty, Mamma once said to me, apropos it seemed, of nothing, "Well, Chris was always my favourite but you've turned out the best." I have puzzled over this ever since, never being quite sure what she meant by "turned out" and why she had to have a favourite.
With my own girls I certainly never have had a favourite; they have each brought their own unique brand of delight. What would be true to say, however, is that Becky was simply easier. I think this was just down to differences in innate personalities. Lizzie was much more inclined to feel and express her emotions in an unfiltered way. She found change unnerving and there were many changes for her to contend with. Becky was more tractable and easier to control.
What has grieved me is to learn that some people saw this as indicating a preference for one daughter over the other and didn't hesitate to tell Lizzie so and to manipulate her emotions in an attempt to drive a wedge between her and her sister. Why they felt they had to do this, I don't know.
It is to Lizzie's credit that they didn't succeed and that she and Becky are still best friends.
Today
I'm in the process of learning the words & tune to "If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between" for my slot in the Laetare Singers offering of foolish moments at Halsway Manor next week. It's a music hall song and I've actually found a recording, made in 1899, by the original singer.
As I learn the words I find myself reflecting on their intrinsic sadness and longing for something better, even though the song is dressed in clown's clothing, so to speak.
These days, in this country we are most of us so far removed from a life where you never see grass or a tree and can only imagine what the countryside might be like.
In My Day
Despite his chairmanship of the Henry Wood Gramophone Circle and tendency to cry when trying to sing a bit of Beethoven, my father loved the old music hall songs. He used to regale us with "His day's work was done" "Whenever I looked at my seaweed", "He stood in a beautiful Mansion", "Boiled beef & carrots" etc etc.
All these songs recorded a gutsy way of dealing with life's inescapable hardships - no proper work, bad food, unfaithful wives, loved ones dying young. I think that for Daddy they reminded him of his hard young days, spent in Clerkenwell in London, avoiding a drunken father, trying to help with tottering finances and learning his alphabet at his mother's knee.
Perhaps they also reminded him of how far he'd come; with an upper-middle class wife, four healthy children and a table laden with nourishing, well-cooked food. He had a big house (even if half of it was sublet), huge Victorian garden and the means to get out to the Surrey countryside or seaside whenever he wished. No houses stood between him and a view of trees and birds.
While I can't remember him ever singing the whole of the "'ouses in between" song to me, he often talked about it with amusement. He saw it solely as "cup half full" song, full of optimism. Maybe by this time he'd become detached enough from his roots not to see the sadness.
I think the last two lines say it all: "If I got a rope and pulley, I could breathe the air more fully...." what a world of hope and sense of suffocation lies therein!
