Afternoon tea, VDay style

Yesterday I delivered the various little bags of chox to local friends, who were suitably pleased with them.  I did it a day early because there was a gloomy forecast of an ice storm to happen overnight.  I didn't want to treat the neighborhood to a demonstration of Seniors On Ice Crossing the Street, so I thought yesterday better.  Judging from the reception nobody minded not waiting a day.

And here's today's tea. Because I'm worth it.

I notice that Tuesday is Shrove Tuesday, must think about pancakes, so soon.  With the requisite lemon juice and sprinkled sugar, to be in the traditional mode I grew up with. It's the 16th, which also happens to be my wedding anniversary.  

In 1963, we got married at 3.20 p.m. on February 16, and left for the US, once the doctoral dissertation was all written, typed, bound, and the defense completed, in mid December that year.  So that's how many years it is since I came to live here.

The reason for the weird time and date, no we did not want a Valentine wedding, cringe, goes back to the Reformation.  I know, everything in England goes back to the Reformation.  Anyway, at that time, Catholic priests lost the legal authority to marry people.  They secretly continued to do the religious ceremony, but they to this day, though they don't have to conduct the church ceremony secretly, can not officiate legally.  For that you need the township registrar.

And since the Catholic Church doesn't recognize marriages of Catholics performed in the registry office, you have to somehow get the two working together.  Registrars hate this, because they have to schedule, travel, and traipse out for a brief ceremony and signing in the sacristy of the church.  So after months of back and forth, we had started the previous June hoping for an October wedding. with the priest patiently changing the church times repeatedly to suit, the registrar finally said he would be present at that exact time in that church.  He would give us 10 minutes, and if we were even slightly late, he would leave.  Oh.  

A few years ago a friend from that region commented that it was funny, she thought she'd been at a wedding in a Catholic church a few miles from there on that same day, at some weird time like 2.16 p.m.  We figured she'd been at the wedding before ours.  So now all was clear to her, too.

It was a nice little wedding, though, just a small group of friends, the few pictures the gift of the photographer, the flowers the gift of the student union where we held the reception, the cake the gift of my matron of honor's mother, my dress and veil the something borrowed. Yes, we were pretty broke, every penny going toward paying for the fares to come to the US to get on with our lives.  I had come down with tonsillities a couple of days before and I was not totally up to par, but it was okay anyway.

So there we go.  Pancakes on Tuesday.  Which reminds me that, brilliant as he was, late spouse could never spell Tuesday.  It always came out Teusday.