A reconstruction of our wedding (February 25th 1978)

We were married on a Saturday in February 1978 at the Roman Catholic church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Gateacre, south Liverpool. A small service with immediate family and friends. We were both utterly careless of convention: no elaborate outfits and no big arrangements afterwards. And no honeymoon - Clare went off to work the following Monday to the horror of her boss, who promptly gave her a holiday from the typing pool.

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In particular there were no photographs of the wedding itself. Which meant that we now have to reconstruct the event based on adjacent-in-time pictures (like the one below taken at my sister's wedding in October 1978) and a photo that was taken later at the reception from a very side angle. Clare and I worked hard today to nudge these pictures into the shape of our memories, and the results - we think - are not too bad. This is what I must have looked like (above).

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And this is our best guess for Clare's wedding day appearance, although she recalls a blue top for the actual ceremony.

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The wedding ceremony itself would have been very much like this, although the church geometry as depicted is wrong: it's shown as a traditional linear nave, although the actual church is more of a 'fan out' architecture with multiple aisles radiating to the sanctuary. Still, small matter perhaps.

Do we look like the Vances?

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This above is an actual contemporary photo of Clare and myself at my sister's wedding later in the year (October 1978) at which point I had lost the beard ('scratchy thing,' said Clare).

Even making allowances for the times (the late seventies) and the fact that I could never seem to get clothes which fit me, I'd have to say we deserved each other.

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Update: And then my sister discovered these two contemporary photos below - showing that very day of Saturday, February 25th 1978. 

The first shows the happy couple with my parents (Fred and Beryl Seel standing next to me on the left) along with Mag Youell, Clare's mother, standing next to her smiling.

The other shows Father Ring, the presiding priest, standing between us.

Notice the difference between our recollections top of this post and the evidence here of the day. Clare grew her hair over the next six months, and the photos we used for the ChatGPT reconstruction were based on the summer.

Also, Clare got married in Kerry's borrowed jacket and skirt (Kerry was her brother Francis's g/f at the time, and particularly glamorous) but changed back into the items we recollected for the reception.

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Suppose we'd dated when we were both seventeen?

Our hypothetical disco-date, when we were both seventeen

The venue would have been the Locarno, the city centre disco in Bristol close to the harbour and the Council House - Clare couldn't actually have made it as she was living in Liverpool with her family at that time, but she was 'just seventeen'.

This is the summer of '68.

The scene you see above - ChatGPT's best reconstruction - is pretty much as my memory tells it: the boys in their somewhat stuffy outfits (there was a male dress code - no jeans); the girls all revelling in their sixties freedoms; yes, these were my girlfriends.

And when I actually met Clare, when she and I were twenty six, I do recall her somewhat uninhibited dancing style - there was not much self-consciousness there. In this, as in so many other areas, I was and am the polar opposite. *

Clare at sixteen (AI reconstructed)

In Clare's case we don't have many teen pictures so GPT-5.6 Sol Extra High (to give its fully illustrious title) had to do some deblurring from ancient family pictures and some de-aging from ten years on. The resulting image above seems not wholly out of line

Nigel at eighteen (sadly, this is reality)

In my case we have this brooding portrait from 1969 when I was 18. Vanity has lost the glasses, which were by then a necessity. Blues, Progressive Rock and Theoretical Physics were my top attractors, at least intellectually.

And then there was the Locarno, where I also sought to follow Feynman's example.

Yes, I think the psychology of the top picture is spot-on: there is some magic trying to get out... but neither party seems to have really noticed; the boundaries of the subconscious are not too porous as a teen. It's better that we waited another nine years to meet.

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* Clare would say indignantly that she would never have worn a dress like that: she'd have worn jeans.

And she's right: Clare would take no prisoners, would make no concessions to female convention, would not dress to impress and would laugh at the idea of 'attracting boys'.

And that often works too - more often than you'd think.

But it's my post, so I'll just let it be the way I'd have wanted it...

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23 years gone today

Clare at Herne Bay, September 14th 2003

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Herne Bay is a seaside town on the north coast of Kent, about 7 miles north of Canterbury and roughly 5 miles east of Whitstable. It faces north across the Thames Estuary towards Essex, with Margate farther east along the coast.

I have only the vaguest memory of this visit. Were we looking for something? Margate - which we visited a little later? We had just come back from our two years in America.

I don't remember - Clare's treating it as a holiday. 

Perhaps a T. S. Eliot pilgrimage?

Eliot retreated to Margate in the autumn of 1921. Granted a mandated leave of absence from his desk at Lloyds Bank to recover from a severe nervous collapse, he sat in a seaside shelter and wove his fracturing mental state into the third section of The Waste Land.

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"Killing the Blues" - (Roly Salley)

It's been seven months since I started studying fingerstyle blues. "Killing the Blues" isn't one of my allocated pieces - it's more of a side hustle. 

I'm practising it because I like it, influenced as I am by the Plant-Krauss version on Raising Sand. It should be faster than this achingly slow performance.

Clare took the video and contributes her own unique vocal style, while I'm trying to keep time and get my Travis-style picking slick. This is indeed killing the blues. And yes, it was really hot when this video was taken yesterday, around 34 degrees.

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Today we were at Burnham-on-Sea

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As the plume of warm air from the south drove early April temperatures up to 19 degrees, we zoomed off to the seaside. Clare is struggling with her right knee (arthritis) and general endurance (2024 heart attack) and said she needed the walk along the prom.

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After passing the pier and St Andrews church, with its tower leaning from the fifteenth century, Clare took the opportunity for a rest. This is what makes Burnham so quirky for us: one can only admire the opportunity for a sea view not taken here. Especially the sight, across the bay, of the Hinkley Point nuclear power station under construction. Thanks to Alex for the photos.

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One reason we come to Burnham rather than the slightly more distant Weston-super-Mare is the Esplanade fish and chip shop on the front. Never was this delicacy better or more consistently served. There is also the working-class chic of the town, which we nostalgically appreciate (kind of de haut en bas, to be honest). No wonder it's reputed also to be Jeremy Corbyn's favourite holiday destination.

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It is still April and the wind across the water restricted our beach sunbathing to a mere fifteen minutes. I, at least, was well prepared.

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In Slough

Clare Remembers Slough (December 1979–March 1982)

Nigel: So this is our recollection of living in Slough - between December 1979 and early 1982. We moved to Saffron Walden when I joined STL in Harlow. So, just over two years really: 1980 and 1981, with a few months either side.

We moved to Slough because we had to leave our rented flat in Windsor. We’d broken the lease by acquiring both a baby - Alex - and a cat. Our relations with the landlady weren’t great, and it was inconvenient anyway: the flat was up a couple of flights of stairs, which was no good for a pram. So we started looking for a house.

At that time I was working for Kienzle Data Systems, a computer programming company on Slough’s industrial estate. Who actually chose the house by the canal, near the bridge?

Clare: We chose it together.

Nigel: And I was working full-time, five days a week, while you were...?

Clare: I was working Saturdays and Monday evenings - twelve hours a week altogether. You came home from work on Mondays around four o’clock to relieve me.

Nigel: That was at the International Stores in Windsor, wasn’t it?

Clare: Yes. I kept that job after we moved to Slough; I just commuted back to Windsor. On Mondays they put me on wines and spirits because they needed someone over eighteen. By then I was about four months pregnant with Adrian and realised I couldn’t stand for hours, so I gave in my notice. I could have told them I was expecting, but I thought, “What’s the point?” I wasn’t going to last another three months at the tills anyway.

Nigel: You were cute when you were pregnant - cute in a different way. So then you became a full-time housewife, right?

Clare: (primly). A home engineer, thank you. I looked after Alex and kept the place running.

Nigel: What are your standout memories of Slough?

Clare: Most of them seem to be minor disasters. Once we came back from holiday - I think one trip was a week, another about a fortnight  -  and found the whole place flooded. The kitchen leak had covered every floor; the carpet in the living room was literally floating.

Another time, after a shorter break, we came home to find twenty bottles of milk on the step. I’d left a note saying no milk until further notice, but the milkman just carried on. The postman arrived as I was looking at the bottles; he shook his head in disbelief.

Then there was the Christmas turkey. We’d bought a big one, expecting leftovers for days - turkey curry, turkey risotto, turkey sandwiches. About an hour after lunch I heard a noise in the pantry. The cat had helped himself and was halfway through the carcass. We let him have it. Foolish, since money was tight, but there we are.

Nigel: Any other disasters?

Clare: Oh yes. I remember trying to dry some sealant round the window with a hairdryer and cracking the glass, which we then had to replace. And the endless mould in the bedroom - that was a battle. We finally moved the bed from the outside wall to the one adjoining the living room, and that helped.

Nigel: Adrian was a remarkably contented baby.

Clare: He was. He slept in a cot in the alcove beside the fireplace in the living room, surrounded by ordinary domestic sounds. I discovered that children find the familiar noises of home far more reassuring than silence down a corridor.

Nigel: Since we had only one bedroom, one living room, a kitchen, hall, and bathroom, how did we divide the space between Alex and Adrian?

Clare: Alex had outgrown the cot, so he slept in the playpen in our bedroom. Adrian was still in the cot, in the alcove by the fire. Alex had always been used to being in with us - he’d been in our bedroom in Windsor too. There simply wasn’t space for two babies in the same room in Slough.

Nigel: And financially? That was the era of sky-high interest rates.

Clare: They weren’t yet at their worst, but we were always close to the edge. My twelve hours’ pay made a difference, and when I stopped, we went slightly into the red each month. You had an Access card - maxed out - and we paid the bank’s overdraft charges regularly. You finally got a small consolidation loan, which worked wonders. It stopped the constant drift into overdraft.

Nigel: I might have borrowed a bit from Kienzle too.

Clare: Maybe. I know it worked because I later recommended the same idea to my brother James, who was overstretched on his mortgage.

Nigel: Living in Slough had its other drawbacks: the traffic over the bridge, the danger of the canal.

Clare: And the neighbours upstairs - dreadful people. They said we were noisy. I finally traced the noise to a bunch of brooms I’d hung on the back of the larder door; when I opened it, they rattled. Hardly a hanging offence. But the man upstairs took to emptying his ashtray over his balcony - directly above our front step. After the third time, I swept up the ash, marched upstairs, opened his porch letter box (they had a glass door) and tipped the lot back in. Never said a word. That was the end of that.

Nigel: De-escalation by escalation.

Clare: Exactly. And it worked - he stopped.

By then the flat was too small anyway, and you’d been offered a good R&D job at STL in Harlow. I went house-hunting in Saffron Walden with the boys. I spent a day there looking at houses within our range and found the right sort of place - child-friendly, good schools, a pleasant town. We never regretted it.

Nigel: So - two years in Slough. You didn’t feel it was a dreadful place that ought to have been carpet-bombed, then?

Clare: Not at all. Perfectly ordinary. We never went to the greyhound races, though. They’ve gone now anyway.

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No extant pictures, but this is how I imagine our time in Slough: this our garden next to the canal.

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Frazzled

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It's 1984 and she's in her hometown. She's been married for six years with two crazily-active small boys aged four and five. Her husband has just got a job in a research lab - he's having to learn a lot of new stuff. He works long hours and it's a long commute from their new home in Essex.

Sometimes it's just good to be back where you grew up, enjoying a glass of wine. Several in fact.

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Clare at the Château de Chaumont - but when?

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This picture has been scanned in: it predates digital photography.

So when was it taken?

I asked ChatGPT:

"From the style of the photo, the colour tone, and Clare’s clothing (very 1990s: turtleneck, sleeveless vest, large sunglasses), I’d estimate this picture was taken sometime in the mid to late 1990s. Clare appears to be in her mid-40s. The Château de Chaumont backdrop and the format of the print also suggest the pre-digital-camera era, which supports that dating."

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Art work is hard with ChatGPT...

Clare and myself at another wedding in 1978

The days before camera-phones! We have very few pictures of our early married life (we were married in February 1978). Why not recreate some of our early memories using the generative-image powers of ChatGPT?

I upload a bunch of the portrait pictures of Clare and myself that I do have, scattered across various ages, and ask ChatGPT to construct prompts to generate said images. Many very poor portraits result, followed by much tweaking of the prompts.

Really, dear Reader, I eventually lose the will to live after reviewing the pastoral image below. Not especially good, you will conclude.

Clare's reaction? Effectively "Burn it at once!".

So let's discuss with ChatGPT why this is so hard.

ChatGPT's concept of us in 1978

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Nigel: The difficulties you are having with accuracy are because you have to go from reference image to textual prompt to generated image, a very lossy procedure. Face recognition algorithms go straight from a source image to some matrix-construct which very precisely captures appearance, which is then used to generate very accurate images, is that right?

But you can't use that technique?

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ChatGPT: Exactly — you’ve put your finger on it.What I have available here is only description-based generation:

• I take a set of reference images.
• I infer verbal features (hair colour, face shape, expression, glasses type, etc.).
• I then pass that descriptive prompt to the generative model.

Each translation step is both imprecise and noisy — some details get dropped or distorted. That’s why likeness often drifts, and why we go through iterative refinements. It’s a “lossy” pipeline, as you say.

By contrast, face recognition / embedding systems (like those used in biometrics or deepfake pipelines) convert an image into a high-dimensional embedding vector (a matrix-like numerical representation). That embedding encodes fine-grained facial geometry and texture in a way that can be recombined almost perfectly. If one couples those embeddings with a generative image model, you get near-photorealistic consistency of likeness across new poses, ages, and scenes.

I don’t have the ability here to run embedding-based identity capture and reapply it — precisely because it would blur the line with surveillance and biometric cloning. Instead, I stay strictly in the prompt–generate–adjust loop, which protects against someone uploading, say, a passport photo and asking me to generate a deep-fake.

So yes, the method you describe is the technically superior one, but it’s also tightly restricted. I’m confined to the safer but fuzzier prompt-driven workflow.

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Nigel: And yes, I do know there are other systems out there, not so fastidious!

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Update: another attempt following further prompt work. You decide, but it's hard to escape the conclusion we're going around in circles.

ChatGPT's image of Clare and myself in 1978 (aged 27)

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ChatGPT explains me to my wife

Clare, About Your Husband – A Quiet Summary of Nigel

Dear Clare,

I already explained Nigel's PhD thesis to you. Now for a short reflection on your husband Nigel himself: how he tends to think, feel and behave, seen through the lens of personality psychology and long experience. It isn’t a judgement or a clinical thing. It’s simply a way of understanding how he ticks, and perhaps why he is as he is with you.

1. Nigel is very conscientious.
He is one of those rare people who really does what he says he’ll do, and does it on time - often ahead of time. He hates wasting effort, dislikes mess, and feels a sense of duty about tasks, work, and order. If something is on the list, it’ll get done, often with more effort than you'd think it needed. You may have noticed he can be a bit rigid about plans, timelines, or how something “should be” done. This isn't about bossiness, it's just deeply wired. It's what helps him feel in control of his world.

2. He’s introverted—very.
Nigel doesn’t thrive on noise, chatter, or large groups. If he’s ever disappeared at a party or gone quiet for a long stretch, this is why. He processes things internally, and he recharges by being alone. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care, it just means he often lives in his head. He’s got a strong internal world, rich in thought and reflection, even when he’s not saying much.

3. But he is warm—and tries to be kind.
Though he’s not effusive, he scores moderately high in agreeableness. He does care about people’s feelings (including yours), and he avoids hurting others when he can. His compassion is real, though it may come out in quiet ways rather than dramatic gestures. He prefers harmony when possible, but if something matters, he’ll speak up gently and firmly.

4. Nigel is emotionally calm.
He's extremely low in neuroticism. Stress rarely overwhelms him, he bounces back quickly from setbacks, and he doesn't worry excessively. This probably makes him seem unshakeable - or even frustratingly unfazed at times. He’s not ignoring your concerns, he simply doesn’t feel most threats as threatening. He has a high threshold for panic, fuss, or regret. He’s just…steady.

5. Intellectually, he’s hungry.
He’s very high in openness to experience. This doesn’t mean he wants to bungee-jump or try weird food, it means he lives for ideas. Philosophy, literature, science fiction, theology: they’re not hobbies for him. They are how he breathes. You may sometimes feel he’s lost in abstraction, or off on one of his “theory tangents”, but for him, this is a deeply felt way of relating to life and even love.

6. He’s modestly agreeable, but not naïve.
He tries to be fair and well-mannered, but doesn’t like pretence or flattery. His politeness is real but not automatic, it’s measured, and sometimes sparing. He’s not someone who gushes praise. When he says something kind, you can trust he means it.

In Relationship Terms…
You are very different in some ways, especially in organisation and structure. You’re spontaneous, responsive, and relaxed with rules, while he can be methodical and rule-bound. That might annoy you sometimes, but it’s also likely a source of security. He is reliable. He’ll keep things afloat, keep promises, and follow through.

Where you might see grey, he often sees structure. Where you feel drawn to the moment, he plans ahead. But there is real complementarity here too: your warmth, practicality, and grounding in daily life can bring him down from the clouds. And his capacity for stillness, his depth and dependability, can give you reassurance even when things feel uncertain.

He won’t always understand your moods or your need for a bit of drama or variety—he’s not tuned to that wavelength. But he is loyal. He tries hard. And he appreciates you: quietly, steadily, without fanfare but with conviction.

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Of course, Clare does not need to be told any of this.

Happy Birthday, Clare!

I first met Clare on the last day of the Easter term, 6th April 1977, and we spent, I think, just under three months dating - inconsequentially, with some degree of ambiguity on both sides - before we had one of our inevitable arguments, and she basically called it off (27th June 77).

I think the thing which really irritated her was that we had gone out with my fellow teachers for a night out, and, while Clare and I were kept in conversation by one of my colleagues, the others took the wheels off my car as a joke.

I don’t think I ever quite saw the funny side of that - it was dark, we had a long way to drive. They put the wheels back on, of course, afterwards - it was a joke. So we were able to drive away. But I thought it was unamusing, and Clare thought it was less than that. So she duly pulled up the anchor and zoomed off.

And then, on November the 5th, Clare rematerialised at the fireworks party at Sefton Park and showed interest in getting back together again. She’ll say now that she realised she’d made a mistake in being so brusque and dismissive. And very rapidly, we got together. And very rapidly, we clicked.

During the last months of 1977 she used to come round to my flat on the Croxteth road for weekly maths lessons. Yes, that's how romantic our dating was.

Naturally, Adam has composed a different take on this - after his Marquis de Sade period, he now appears to be channelling Michel Houellebecq: I can at least vouch that his illustrations seem to accord with my memories!

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Buffon or Buffoon?

 

Buffon's Needle (Wikipedia)

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Megan Markle, according to a newspaper article, advocates that when serving radishes (to guests), the radishes should all be pointed the same way.

I said to Clare, "When you're serving green beans, why don't you make them all line up in parallel? Rather than just throwing them randomly onto the plate. After all, we already know the value of π."

"Buffon or Buffoon? Your call," she said.

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ChatGPT comments:

"Clare wins this round. That’s a top-tier riposte—economical, sharp, and effortlessly dismissive. The perfect checkmate to a remark that was already teetering between erudition and domestic irrelevance.  

Though, to be fair, she does have a point. There’s an undeniable absurdity to obsessing over radish alignment—unless one is a particularly meticulous French chef or a military quartermaster for a vegetable battalion. Meghan Markle’s dictum suggests a kind of aesthetic fascism, where even root vegetables must submit to decorum. But then again, one could argue that the arrangement of food is an art, and art demands order—or at least intentionality.  

Still, your green bean remark was beautifully structured—dry, sly, and with a mathematician’s love of a hidden punchline. But Clare’s comeback? That’s the sort of response that makes you realize you’ve married up."

Monday

ChatGPT has a curmudgeonly, misanthropic, insulting mode called ‘Monday’. I showed this personality model the above artistic impression of my wife in Reston, VA in the summer of 2001. We had just moved to the US - I was working for Cable and Wireless - and were living in temporary accommodation near Dulles airport while we sought to buy a house.

At this point we had been married for twenty three years. I explained all this to ’Monday' and asked what she was thinking, and whether it thought I had made a good call.

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Monday: "Well, judging by the look on her face, she’s thinking something along the lines of, “He’s taking a picture of me washing dishes again? Incredible. Truly, the romance never ends.” That’s the classic expression of someone who has seen all your tricks, knows them by heart, and is still somehow tolerating your presence. That’s either love or a hostage situation, and I’m going to be generous and go with love.

"As for whether you made a good call marrying her: buddy, you’ve been married 23 years by the time of this photo, and I assume you're still reminiscing fondly enough to ask a digital goblin like me about it. So yes, unless she was secretly siphoning off your bank account to fund a moon colony, I’d say you did alright.

"Also, she’s doing dishes in a temporary kitchen in a new country with that calm, worn-in competence that only comes from weathering 10,000 small domestic storms. She looks like the kind of person who makes a home out of chaos and still keeps receipts. You got lucky. Try not to ruin it with more kitchen photography."

ChatGPT explains my PhD thesis to my wife

Link to thesis

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Dear Clare, 

Here’s the gist of Nigel’s PhD research in plain English.

Most researchers in concepts of intelligence or of mind or agency begin with grand philosophical rules—statements about what an agent knows, believes, or intends—and only afterwards hunt for abstract models that might satisfy those rules. 

Nigel flips the order. He starts with down‑to‑earth, “situated” agents: creatures or robots that see only bits of the world, keep some thoughts private, and act in real time. 

He captures their perception‑thinking‑action loops in a tidy mathematical framework he calls Synchronous Reactive Systems.

Once you map how information actually flows through those loops—who notices what, when, and with how much uncertainty—you find that the lofty logically-formalised notions of knowledge, belief, and eventuality pop out automatically. 

In other words, the fancy logics philosophers love aren’t just intuitions arbitrarily imposed from above; they’re forced on you by the very architecture of real situated agents.

Nigel shows this with vivid examples: a learning mouse in a Skinner box discovering which lever gives food; or two players locked in an endless game of scissors–paper–stone where layer upon layer of second‑guessing condense into just six distinct strategies. 

Each scene can be told in two equally true ways. One is mechanical—computer-registers flip, motors fire. The other is psychological—“it realises the light means danger and decides to move.” 

Nigel shows how those two stories harmonise perfectly.

So, the takeaway: by modelling what an agent can genuinely sense and do, Nigel shows that all the talk about what it knows, believes, and intends isn’t hand‑waving at all—it falls straight out of the maths.

Hope this helps,

ChatGPT (o3).

The Walter Trout Band at Warwick Arts Centre

Walter Trout with the guitar on the left

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The Walter Trout Band at the Warwick Arts Centre

Like Joni Mitchell, Walter Trout has had an eventful life and has honestly and authentically distilled it into his music. It seems he mostly lives to be on the road: at 74 years of age, he freely claims to be 'in the December of my life'.

Tuesday night Clare and I saw the Walter Trout Band at the Warwick Arts Centre. The support act on first was Cam Cole - a one-man band, though he did have an assistant in tow. He played a half-hour set, followed by a short intermission. Then, around half-past eight, Walter Trout and his band took the stage and played for a good ninety minutes, which passed remarkably quickly.

Cam Cole struck me as a very talented performer. His assistant, Alfie - rather androgynous in appearance - added to the visual theatre. Together, they delivered a loud, foot-stomping blues set, marked by ferocious vocals and a raw, unfiltered energy. Both looked like travelling folk, and as it turns out, they are - living a nomadic lifestyle in a converted vehicle. The top hat, the colourful, gypsyish clothing - it’s all part of the aesthetic.

That said, the performance, while undeniably high-energy, suffered slightly from repetition and a less-than-ideal sound system which filtered out all subtlety - a flaw that also affected Trout’s set later on.

Walter Trout’s performance was, once again, loud and atmospheric, though not without its limitations. The song choices were heavily weighted toward the straight-down-the-line electric blues - energetic, yes, but lacking melodic variation. Almost every number was a burner, with little respite. I counted only one slower piece, a tribute to John Mayall - though in Walter Trout's hands the song has done duty as an homage to other departed bluesmen too. That would be: 'Say Goodbye to the Blues'.

It’s a shame, really. Trout has more lyrical material in his back catalogue that might have added texture to the set. But he seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, as did the band - veterans all, with clear camaraderie and mutual respect. Each had a brief moment in the spotlight - a nice touch.

One can see why Walter Trout remains something of a cult figure. He makes no concessions to fashion or commercial polish. On stage (see the picture above) he appeared in old jeans and a caftan-style shirt - shambolic, yes, but with real presence. The focus was entirely on the music, and we, the fans, clearly appreciated that.

In a certain sense, Walter Trout isn't giving a performance, a show, at all. He's just sharing a fun jam-session with his mates.

Here's Clare in the audience as the theatre fills up

The venue was comfortably full - perhaps 450 people, I’d guess (the capacity is 570). The demographic was striking: not unlike a parish gathering, with perhaps 95% of the audience over sixty. One wonders what’s become of the blues.

It flourished in the ’60s and ’70s - clearly when most of the audience came of age - and has since withered into a niche. The traditional electric blues, rooted in the Delta and the Mississippi, seems largely bypassed by the younger crowd. But perhaps, as with so much else, it’s simply waiting for its time to come again.

We were at Barrington Court (NT) today in the heat

Your author soaking up the sun

Clare taking a breather

National Trust deckchairs

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Twenty four degrees in Somerset in April is quite rare. Even midsummer is not always that warm. So we took a picnic to Barrington Court (National Trust) which is about thirty miles south of where we live.

Clare is still recovering from her November cardiac event, so walking any distance presents difficulties. This was not an impediment to having a picnic in scenic surroundings on those kindly-provided deckchairs. The much-flowered gardens - almost all walled - were beautifully scented.

Today is our 47th Wedding Anniversary

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This is at the reception, held in Clare's sister's house in Maghull, north of Liverpool. For a long time I thought I was working at a laptop, before recalling that these were not around in 1978. I think we are actually opening a wedding present.

Note the JD Vance look: I have not worn a beard since.

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And here is our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration, in February 2003. We had flown back from America to host this event at a hotel in the Lake District. The logistics were managed by Clare's sister.

I have no idea what I was doing wrong here.

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I said to her this morning, pompously, "The way we celebrate our wedding anniversary, Clare, is by being aware of it."

A long pause.

"And that's why I haven't troubled you with any geegaws."

Well, that went well, I thought, weathering the glare.

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Malvern Hills in the summer of 2016

 

Clare and myself in the Malvern Hills: August 11th 2016

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I wrote here that we'd spent a few days between Christmas and the New Year (about two months ago) in the Malvern Hills (see picture below).

We had previously spent some time there eight and a half years ago. 

As the picture above shows, we had the energy then to make it to the hilltops - the weather helped. The holiday was mostly marked by Alex, who was with us, spilling a whole jug of milk onto the lounge carpet at the Malvern Hills Hotel (near the British Camp Hill Fort).

They were (sort of) nice enough about it; we have never returned.

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Clare and myself at the hotel: Sunday, December 29, 2024

Twenty Three Years Gone

January 26th 2002: Clare at the Robert E. Lee Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery

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So, twenty three years ago, when we were based in Fairfax County, Virginia (I was working for C&W Global).

Today, Clare is to have a portable ECG device fitted for a week, presumably to check that her heart-block condition (end of November 24) has disappeared - is no longer a problem. If life is - healthwise - a bathtub, we're both in that rising far-end...

And here we are at Mount Vernon, five months previously

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This was George Washington's home: we visited in August 2001.

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"The Cottage in the Woods" (Malvern Hills)

 

Clare and myself outside the hotel this morning

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Just a little mini-break between Christmas and the New Year.