45 and counting

 

at Wood Green Registry Office, 1978

Yesterday was our 45th wedding anniversary, another Saturday.  We celebrated today with a marvellous meal at the Ecailler des Beaux Arts in Montpellier.  It is a fish and seafood restaurant, not too far from the Med to make the oysters and other shellfish seem out of place - sadly none of thsoe for me since I don't want to tempt the violent reactions I've had a couple of times.  But many other kinds of fish and they certainly know how to cook it - Mary had sole and I rare-cooked tuna.  A lovely, sunny meal on the terrace.

45 marvellous years, attested by the ages and lives of our sons and their families, seems an impossibly long time, and details  blur, but so do even the details of the  last 17 which we've spent in France.  Before that we had spent a quarter of a century in Derbyshire, 3 different houses in Wirksworth, but I think this is the longest we've spent in one house.  Ideally houses would grow and shrink around your changing needs, but they are stubbornly inflexible, though bits wear out and need replacing or redecorating, while the gardens just grow and have to be cut back unless bits just die.  

our jasmine arch, sadly gone these past 2 years

The 17 years here have been accompanied by finding new friends (both French and fellow expats), much around the regular conversation groups we attend in various private houses twice a week through a network which has kept going in various forms since the mid 2000s.   We have a modest but active musical life for both of us, my work in and for the Montpellier English-language Library (now counting over 2,000 volumes) and a gentle getting-to-know this area and others in France with wine connections.  We were not dramatically affected by Covid and its restrictions because we continued to have a fairly quiet life (lots of reading and tv filling the gaps)

Our Friday conversation group  last week

This blog has returned from time to time to the subject of pain.  I remember writing a lot about it when my arthritic left knee was replaced in 2015.  Actually these days the multiple pains I have are not too bad - more arthritis, sciatica, a touch of gout (from uric acid, an occupational hazard of a wine drinker - my doctor keeps telling me water is better for me), and a weird hangover of the old knee replacement which is a cross between numbness and a diffuse kind of pain - repeated x-rays show the metal joint is still in place and working OK.  Oh, and intense itching which erupts at random on one leg or the other.  This is interesting - dermatologists keep wanting you to rub cream and so on into the skin, but having read a bit I know that this arises from neurological disturbance inside the body, not from the skin.  Ice packs help at night.  I keep gently exercising on my static bike and Mary enjoys her weekly Qi-gong sessions, and we are very well monitored by a variety of generalist and specialist medical services.

There is a lot more on my mind, not least random comments I make on Facebook which non-FB friends don't automatically see, and of course nobody has to read all this.  But watch this space...