The personal and the public: 10 years on

Ten years ago we brought down the Government, and then we got married. It was a very happy time, all in all. Lots of things are conspiring just now to bring it all back, and to remind us how long it’s been.

There’s Tony Blair’s resignation, of course (I could write a long essay on all the emotions that produces. Maybe another time. I guess there are enough of those essays about at the moment – you don’t need me to add to them).

And this morning I got an email from a friend who did one of the readings at our wedding (a few lines about marriage taken from Four Quartets), asking for a pointer to the text so that he could read it again at someone else’s. So I dug the wedding script out again and spent a happy half-hour wallowing in nostalgia.

Andrew has just installed MediaWiki here so that we can have our own household wiki, for shopping lists and so on — mundane stuff, mostly. (Much cursing during the installation process, which seemed to require a complete OS upgrade on our fileserver. Why are these things always so hard?). So this morning I put the wedding script in as the first page. Seemed a good starting point.

Doesn’t time fly?

Time should leave scars

I lost one of the small sapphires from my engagement ring a few days ago. On closer examination it appears that the ring is quite worn, which is probably why the stone fell out. I wear it all the time alongside my wedding ring so the gold must gradually have abraded.

It must be repaired, of course, but we don’t want the incident to leave no trace. Time should leave scars. The posh assistant at Catherine Jones was rather shocked at our request but the customer is always right – so they are busy on the phone at the moment looking for non-matching replacement stones. The best candidate so far is a pink sapphire.

Planning blight

This is what happens to urban areas when there is a grand plan – something that might involve demolishing existing buildings – under discussion but not decided upon (perhaps there’s a dispute over planning permission or there are problems finding the money). The motivation to maintain the existing buildings and streetscape is lost. What’s the point, when it’s all going to be pulled down soon? Things gradually decay. You can see it at the moment in Cambridge in the area around the railway station.

Recently I’ve realised that planning blight can happen on a domestic scale too, and that in fact our own house and garden have got a bad case of it. Ever since we moved into this house (2001) we’ve known that we wanted to make radical changes. (We bought it because of its location.) This culminated last year in a scheme to demolish the whole thing and start again. I was quite enamoured of the idea for several months and am only gradually being persuaded out of it by my more cautious other half.

Meanwhile none of the over-counter lighting in the kitchen works any more.