25
Monday, April 3, 2017 at 17:48 It's our 25th wedding anniversary today.
To celebrate the occasion my wife and I are flying to Lisbon for a few days.
I met Clare in 1990 at a party in Edinburgh. I was living in London at the time and she lived in Glasgow so for two years we spent most of our weekends flying back and forth.
We got married on April 3, 1992, at 11.00am in a small Catholic church in Eaglesham, Scotland's first conservation village, just south of Glasgow.
After the service we led everyone across the common to a small tea room where guests were served cakes, champagne and tea.
Two hours later, with our eyes firmly on the clock, we set forth by car for the Isle of Skye where we were joined by 18 friends and relatives.
In unseasonably bright sunshine the journey took five hours but no-one got lost and everyone arrived in good time for dinner.
Hotel Eileen Iarmain overlooking the Sound of Sleat wasn't our discovery. Our friends John and Susie had stayed there a few years years earlier and shortly after Clare and I met we stayed there too.
It seemed the obvious place for our wedding dinner and for our guests it was a bit of an adventure.
Two days later we returned to Glasgow before driving south to Heathrow where we caught a flight to Miami. Discovering that we were newly married BA even upgraded us, which is a bit of a cliche, but we weren't complaining.
For the first week of our honeymoon Madsen Pirie had very kindly offered us the use of his holiday house in the Florida Keys.
He even threw in the use of his car that was conveniently parked at the local airport when we arrived on a small plane from Miami.
We loved it there but our return flight to Miami was the worst I've ever experienced.
Our small plane reacted like a bucking bronco when the pilot - who we could see grappling with the controls - tried to navigate around a thunderstorm.
It was probably only 30 seconds but it felt like several minutes. An abiding memory was Clare furiously counting her Rosary beads in prayer!
For week two we flew from Miami to the Cayman Islands where we were guests of an old schoolfriend who had only recently got married himself.
Bill was working there as a corporate lawyer. Today he and Patty live in Ireland with their three children.
Clare and I have two children of our own who were both born in Edinburgh.
Forest brought me back to London for work and we've lived in Cambridgeshire ever since.
My one regret is ... in all that time we've never been back to Skye!
PS. I still see Bill when I'm in Dublin and tomorrow, a few weeks after his own silver wedding anniversary, he sets off for the North Pole.
When I get a moment I'll post a link to the expedition blog.
Reader Comments (1)
Ours is next September. It seems absurd that I've been alive long enough to have been married a quarter century. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
In any event, congratulations and best wishes to Mr. and Mrs. Clark.