Five
years ago today I wrote a post to mark our forty-fifth wedding anniversaryand Grandson#2’s eleventh birthday. In the
years since then, we have sold our home of over forty years and moved down into
the valley, where we are now very happily settled. Today Grandson#2 reaches the
advanced age of sixteen, whilst DH and I pinch ourselves to be sure we aren’t
dreaming that fifty years really have passed since that wet April Monday in
Oxford when the two of us were married.
As
soon as I sat down to try to to think of words to sum up those fifty years, I
was swamped by so many memories, happy, sad, funny, serious, mundane or truly extraordinary,
that I despaired of distilling them into anything shorter than a sizeable book.
Instead I turned, as I do increasingly as the years pass, to images, to the
photographs which have chronicled the fifty years of our life together, as our
children were born, grew up and went out into the world and in their turn found
partners and settled down to produce a new generation.
By
and large these years have been good ones, for which we are both very grateful.
There have been difficulties and sorrows, but they have been balanced by joys
and the satisfaction of work and other interests and now by the contentment of our life together in our seventies. My hope is that these snapshots
will give you a at least a flavour of what those fifty years have meant to us
both.
Image: Crucifixion, part of a series depicting the stations of the Cross. Chapel Nosso Senhor dos Passos, Santa Casa de Misericórdia of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Oil on canvas, 19th century, unknown artist.
Music: Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) Stabat Mater (1736)
Just
grabbing a few moments peace and quiet, while DH takes the rest of the family into the
village to see the Christmas lights, to wish you all a very happy New Year. 2017
has been a difficult year for many, yet it is human nature to look forward at
the year’s turning and trust that next year things will be different and
better.
In
that spirit may I wish you and yours health, contentment and peace of body and
mind in 2018.
This is the first Christmas for 11 years that we will spend at home in Wales, so it seems appropriate to wish you all a very happy Christmas in Welsh. As it’s so long since I hosted the family for Christmas instead of being hosted by them, I’d forgotten how much work is involved. That must be why it’s taken me until the morning of Christmas Eve to gather my thoughts sufficiently to write my Christmas blog post. But now the house is quiet, with some visitors out, the younger generation busy with their own affairs, and DH en route, bring his mother to spend Christmas with us.
Searching for music was, as always, intensely pleasurable and also fraught with memories, conjured up by a few notes or bars of this carol or that. The carol I’ve chosen has been one of my favourites ever since I sang it as a first-year undergraduate in 1965, discovering the joys of choral singing as a member of the college chapel choir. The carol setting was still new and not yet well-known and I was young, which may be why it embedded itself in my heart and is still so powerfully evocative. The glorious rendering also dates from that era and it comes to you with my warmest wishes for a very happy Christmas and a peaceful and healthy New Year.
Image: The Adoration of the Shepherdsby Matthias Stom (c. 1600 – 1652)