Late, and sorry

Apologies

Unreservedly to BLISS: I should've blogged our 26^th wedding anniversary on the 2^nd. I didn't because, pretty transparently, I'm frantically trying to catch up. The original idea was to churn out (pop out, jot down, scribble, curl up) something on a daily basis. Not too anal about it or anything. Room for missing a few and all that. But not for getting over a month behind.

I'm sorry BLISS. Date blindness as well as male pattern fridge-blindness.

Twenty six years is an achievement (for you) and the blink of an eye for me:

And reservedly to Kiz. Because from here (in the future-blogoverse) I haven't forgotten your birthday. Yet. But I may do. If that makes temporal or existential sense.

Anyway.

About a week late (published date) and about six or seven weeks late (real time), thanks, BLISS, for twenty six years, easy, hard, skint, flush, up, down, all of them blessed and BLISS'ED with liberal doses of love and that tear-running, rib-aching, side-splitting laughter.

The tale of the scales:

1^st meeting: below-par, needed building up 12 st 7 lbs (that's me, by the way).

Fighting weight: about 14 st.

Hamstring tear, family holiday, sudden weight-gain: 16 st.

Realisation – punchbag, rowing machine, gym machines: rearrangement, still 16 st.

Injury: 18 st.

Desk lifestyle: a biscuit under 20 st.

That's me.

BLISS: three kids. No change.

That's unfair.

When you Google wedding anniversaries looking for inspiration, there's an ever-increasing obscurity to the gifts you're supposed to buy. They start off, in the early days, with stuff like wood, tin, and paper, before hitting more costly themes. There was one in the early twenties somewhere where an American website suggested 'original artwork'.

“Happy original artwork anniversary, dear.”

“Why thanks hon. A biro doodle on a paper napkin, how thoughtful.”

I know I should've grown out of it by now, but I can't help doing it every year. We've been married so long, there probably wasn't a Google when we started off. Imagine that. Having to find stuff out without WikiPedia or Ask Jeeves. Like those olden days when you had to stick a phoneline up your computer's arse to get a hit-and-miss, slow and flaky connection to...well...not anything very much really. We were even buying newspapers in those days. Like paper ones. Even the Standard in the evenings. It's a long time, is twenty six years.