Marriage

The weekend before last, I came home from walking the dog at about noon to find Caroline asleep in bed. This was surprising for three reasons. She’d been up and about when I left the house. She’s not one for taking naps. And her mother was coming to lunch. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, prodding her awake. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I felt a headache coming on, took some Nurofen and suddenly started feeling incredibly dizzy. So I decided to lie down for a few minutes and then fell asleep.’ I wasn’t too worried because she does occasionally suffer from dizziness, usually accompanied by a migraine. So I made lunch

My late parents perpetually promoted their marriage as the best in the history of the universe. Because this cult of two was hardly subtle, others readily detected what they wanted to hear, so fawning social admiration of what lovebirds they were made them even worse. For us kids, this Trumpesque superlative (how they’d hate that adjective) wasn’t remotely as traumatising as divorce, but still – the romantic hagiography was a bit much. In our adulthoods, our own sad little relationships could never compare, and our parents seemed to feel sorry for us. While big proponents of marriage as an institution, they seemed to regard their children’s marriages as pale imitations

I slept only between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m, thanks to self-induced terror tactics. My son Adam stayed over, having offered to accompany me for my angiogram – or ‘the procedure’. He kindly moved my old Honda Jazz round the corner and parked his car in my space overnight. The procedure revealed that a) I am impossible to sedate – I once told a full joke under anaesthetic; b) I am neurotic; and c) I didn’t, after all, need a stent. So why was I so breathless? Could it be because, at three score and ten… er… plus eight, I find myself in love? Prescription: I must walk

Relationships are about compromise and no wonder so many of us come a cropper in this department when we don’t embrace this central truth. There is a man out there (using the term loosely) who would dutifully follow my orders to go to a fancy boutique during his trip to London and buy me an Ortigia liquid soap in Zagara fragrance, but that man is not the builder boyfriend. All the time the BB has been away the spaniels have pined for him and been hypervigilant, barking at every sound A few years ago, I forced him into a shop called Evie Loves Toast to buy me this posh hand

I always think of my father at this time of year. In particular, I go back to the summer of 1997 – the year he died and the year the England he knew died as well. You went to bed in the confidence that tomorrow could only bring the same happiness as today We always spent July and August at his house in Italy, with gardens that tumbled down to the sea. There was a comforting symmetry to those days. The mornings began with the BBC World Service; the evenings were spent mixing white ladies and arguing over the newspapers I had bought in the port, with its boats bobbing

You need a personal public service number to get married in Ireland, but in order to get one, you need to be married. It’s one of the most intractable double binds on offer here and it’s very frustrating when you’re trying to beat the Grim Reaper by getting hitched. I got a PPS number when I bought the house in West Cork. My solicitor arranged it. A different but equally bedevilling Catch-22 applied to that. So I thought, all right, I will. I better get married, make a will and prepare for the end In order to buy a house in Ireland I needed a PPS number. But to get

‘Please, I’ll do anything,’ I told the plumber. ‘I’ll give you all the money I have if you just come back here for one day and connect the new hot water system.’ The plumber said no bother, he would come this weekend. But he says that every week, and every weekend when he doesn’t come he says he’ll come the next week. And the next week he says he’ll come at the weekend, and so on. And this has been going on for months. Which is nothing, apparently. Frankly, the builder boyfriend could go to college and get a degree in plumbing faster than we could get a plumber It is

One of my exes is trying to get me arrested. I discovered this when I received an email from the Met Police saying that he had accused me of stealing his belongings. As he is not a British citizen, the nice policeman I spoke to said I need do nothing in response. I was puzzled, until I remembered that after we had parted ways my ex had said: ‘I’d like to see you behind bars.’ I hadn’t realised he had meant it literally. The bastard. When we parted ways, my ex had said: ‘I’d like to see you behind bars.’ I hadn’t realised he meant literally I wondered what I

‘We thought the house would make the most fantastic centre for climate action,’ I heard myself telling the cat rescue lady as she let the two moggies out of their carriers into the living room. I was trying to reassure the socially conscious liberal who had brought the two cats we were adopting that she was leaving them in what she would consider a good place. I said: ‘We want it to be somewhere schoolchildren can come to learn about biodiversity…’ What was I on about? Still, pretending I was turning my house into a climate crisis hub was a bit much. I had just come back from the bank

‘How does anyone young and stupid manage to get married?’ I kept shouting at the builder boyfriend as I pummelled the keys of my laptop to try to force the website of the registrar to give me a date. It seems I picked the worst possible time to try to serve notice because, as anyone who has contacted a registrar lately will know, they are experiencing unprecedented demand for their services. This dream I had of going down the local register office and getting quietly hitched with no fanfare was fading Either there are record numbers of births or couples wanting to tie the knot, or this spike in excess