The Queenager | What I know about love

It's my 20th Wedding anniversary today and it's not going exactly to plan...

Dear Queenagers

Well today is my 20th Wedding Anniversary and I was supposed to be off having a lovely time at the Manoir au Quatr’ Saisons – home of Raymond Blanc and where we got married from two decades ago (the pic is us then). But instead I am at home; my poor husband got Covid and is confined to quarters. So here I am on my own, being nurse instead…

It’s made me realise how much he does: the fridge is bare, the washing is piling up… I had to go and get my eldest daughter back from uni and managed to smash her cafetiere and knock her appallingly packed stuff off the trolley onto the quad. She kept saying: “We need dad”. She was right.

As part of our celebrations, we’d planned to go on a romantic trip to the On Form sculpture exhibition at Asthall Manor outside Burford, Oxfordshire. It’s my husband’s best thing. A Cotswold garden out of a fairy tale, all blue fox gloves and peonies and banks of daisies and a mighty beech tree, purple and grey overlooking the river Windrush. The Mitfords lived there for a while – the house is a yellow stone dream and the modern sculptures are dotted around the ballroom, church, and best of all the grounds. In mid June the plants almost hyperventilate with fecundity; nature at its most abundant, pink petals and silvery poplars, a child’s dream of a tree-house, a gypsy caravan, and amongst it all, abstract thought in stone. At the entrance to the exhibition is a sign saying: When one is in the sphere of the beautiful, no explanations are necessary (Brancusi)… I love the lack of imposed meaning, the chance to feel what the pieces mean for yourself; with no right or wrong answers.

I went with my daughter and a couple who were at university with my husband – I told you it was his trip. On the way there we passed the church where these two were married nearly 30 years ago, and the house where they lived when they were first hitched. I took this picture of them surrounded by roses looking like newly weds.

One of the sculptures was two high marble prongs, one side smooth marble, the other side rough. I stood stroking it with my friend while his wife and my daughter laughed at us. “It’s marriage,” I said. “The rough with the smooth – how they interlink, how you can’t have one without the other.”

My daughter rolled her eyes (she thinks this looks like a scrotum). She was in my stomach when I got married. I cried all the way through the ceremony. I blamed her, then. Said being pregnant had made me emotional. But that wasn’t the reason. I cried because I felt so moved and happy and relieved – like I’d finally come home. Marrying Derek is the best thing I ever did.

I’d never had much of a thing about being married. I attended both of my parents’ second weddings before I was ten. I remember having white carnations put in my hair by a hairdresser and wearing a turquoise green frock at my mum’s marriage to my step-father Peter. He was a rock; when I woke up in the night it was he who interpreted my dreams (he was a psychoanalyst). When I went to teenage parties he’d pick me up; grumpy, sat in a grey Saab Turbo listening to Radio 4. There. However late it was.

I didn’t have much luck with steady boyfriends till I met my now husband. I picked wrong ‘uns – didn’t really understand what good looked like until on a trip to India (to visit an old uni pal) I was introduced to Derek, his erstwhile travelling companion. I was lying reading a book on the roof of the Shanti Guest House in Hampi, Karnataka – an ancient deserted city, full of temples - in a landscape that looks like gods have been throwing boulders around for larks.

“Meet Derek” said my chum. I looked up and there he was. He had long hair and was wearing a yellow t-shirt (which is weird, he never wears yellow). He’d been walking the Anapurna circuit. He’d also studied English Literature. We had a chat. He came down to my room for some shade. We kept on chatting (we’ve never stopped), we went for walks. The mates I was there with wanted to chat up Israeli girls and drink fizzy beer (it was a dry city, all booze came in on a motorbike over bumpy roads); they weren’t interested in exploring the temples. Derek was. We bought oranges and cheese and tomatoes and bread and went on endless picnics and forays round the old ruins. There were marble pillars that played tunes, snakes under rocks, the Mango Tree Restaurant on a bend in the river where food ordered at 11am would arrive at 4pm (they had to go and shop it and make it in a leisurely manner, Kofta takes time). We’d lounge in hammocks, talking nonsense. One night Derek purloined some fire clubs and juggled flames for me. I was in. I remember reaching out to take the bag of oranges from his hand one morning and he flinched when I touched him. And I knew in that moment there was a spark, that he felt it too; this was more than a travelling friendship.

After three weeks I returned to London. I was 26 and Features Editor on the Telegraph. Derek was heading to Bodgaya to do a retreat and setting off again into the Himalayas. We wrote to each other Poste Restante – letters sent to random post offices in the mountains – Parhard Ganj, places with strange names. I didn’t know if he’d received them or not. But I got his. I still have them - packed carefully in a special box with my childrens’ baby teeth. Treasures. Pearls beyond price.

Derek made me feel different – a nicer, calmer version of myself. He was a moral compass. He also had my back. Always. I remember going to an ante natal yoga class where we had to fall back into the arms of our partner. I have never been a sylph – and I was enormously pregnant – but I knew he had me, that he would catch me – whatever. And he always has.

Those of us who grow up being the responsible ones, the grown ups, even though we are actually the children, crave that certainty, that security, the knowledge that someone else is looking out for you. That it’s not, always, down to you. He was the first person who made me feel like that; I just knew it was different. My friends were suspicious – “A juggler? You met in India? Really?” – but I knew he was the right one for me. I’ve given that advice to so many people over the years – don’t choose your partner for your friends, or your family, choose the person who is right for you, who sets you on fire, who makes you feel safe, and is your best friend. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks; YOU know.

 I’ve made some bad decisions in my life, but choosing and being chosen by Derek was the best one.

We got married in Oxford registry office with only two guests, our two witnesses – my brother Max (the son of my stepfather, the other rock; I wanted his name on my marriage certificate) and Liz, the lady in the rose picture amongst the sculptures, above; Derek’s best friend. I suppose it was fitting that my daughter was there too (here she is at the sculpture last weekend).

She was also at the wedding, albeit in my stomach (in the photo at the top of the post she is in my stomach). Last weekend I found myself wearing the dress I got married in (it is light green, Ghost, satin) – it is as if time has come full circle. All those elements that were there twenty years ago are still very present in my life, two decades on (albeit older and more wrinkly).

So I suppose this newsletter is about circularity, but also about certainty. Those rare certainties we have in life when big love creeps in and makes your soul its home.

Writing this it occurs to me that perhaps it is fitting that I have spent the last week looking after Derek over our anniversary, as he has spent so much of our life together looking after me.  Maybe me running up and downstairs with meals and paracetamol, mopping his brow, is a more appropriate  way to celebrate all our years together than a night at the Manoir – it has certainly been a lesson in appreciation. And it’s made me realise that I can go and do lovely things with friends and my gorgeous daughters – but it’s not the same without him. That with no Derek there is a big piece missing.

My life changed two years ago, at the beginning of lockdown when I got whacked from my job and got Covid. I cried a lot, shed a lot, pruned back everything I no longer needed - and set out on a new path. In all those months since, I’ve had Covid twice, as have our daughters, but Derek never got it, even though he nursed me – and them - through both bouts. How strange that he should end up sick now. What are those vows? For richer for poorer, In sickness and in health, for better for worse”

As the sculpture showed me – in marriage you take the rough with the smooth. And sometimes in the rough you find the smooth; it is in the cherishing of each other that you find the gold.

Lots of love

Eleanor

Ps This Sunday – June 26th – the first Noon Walk with wonderful novelist Ericka Waller, who some of you will remember from the Noon Book Club, will take place in Brighton at noon (when else). If you’d like to join us (it’s free) sign up here on this Eventbrite link

Pps next week I will being doing a whole letter on the best Queenager reading for this summer – if there is anything you think ABSOLUTELY HAS to be in there do email me on eleanor@inherspace.co.uk and tell me why and I’ll add it to the list (maybe)

Ppps – our suggestion of a group for parents of teens with eating disorders is kicking off on July 12th – sign up here. We’re also going to run one for parents struggling with youngsters who are suffering from severe anxiety, depressed, self-harming etc as there seems to be a need. So again if you are interested in that email me eleanor@inherspace.co.uk  

Have a great week