10th October, 2010

Here’s to my wonderful parents, who celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary this week.  They mated for life, as Woody Allen would say, like pigeons or Catholics.

If all human discourse is ultimately about what constitutes the good life – if the basic question is How To Live? – then you could do worse, it seems, than to adopt the following model:

Start by getting married on 4th October, 1950, in St Mary’s Church, Ryde, Isle of Wight.  Get your photograph taken outside the Ship And Castle, then roll up your sleeves for a life of toil in catering and frozen foods.  Stand for office and serve your community.  Create a loving and ridiculously extended family environment.  Celebrate education, ambition and the nutritional and intellectual benefits of decent ice cream.   Eat pasta every Sunday night.  Send five kids to university for the opportunities you yourselves never had.

Bounce grandchildren on your knee.  Ten or twelve – who’s counting? – will do.  Delight in others, be they humble, high-class, or holy.  Share generously and laugh infectiously.  Take particular pleasure in language and storytelling, and be sure to examine things from every point of view.  Come late, but gladly, to the world of drama, film and glamour.  Suffer devastating pain, but count what you had, not what you lost.

Travel religiously together.  And if that, on occasion, should not be possible, wait anxiously for your loved one to return.  Be ready with tea.  Insist on fine china cups, and milk first.

Be sentimental.

But go to work.

In this fashion, sail past your silver, your golden, your diamond anniversary and beyond.  With that skip in the step and that glint in the eye, you’ll be the envy of, the pride of, the example to, us all.