Lazy anniversary...

Ian and I have now been married for seven years (and together for twelve)...however our celebrations this year have been foiled somewhat as the result of over-celebrating (read: drinking a little more than may have been sensible) a friend's birthday last night...so we woke remembering our very happy wedding day with the help of some paracetamol.

My parents dropped these beautiful birds round for us - I love that my mother places such importance on always buying things in pairs to celebrate our anniversary - they are painted metal and I can't stop looking at them: I love both their shape and their patterns. She told me that she bought them from the Lavender Room in Brighton when she went visiting there for a day.

I tend to do a lot of looking at photos anyway - the ones that we have up never seem to become part of the furniture for me - but on anniversaries I tend to go around the house throughout the day and spend a bit longer looking at the photos of Ian and I together. This one above was taken when I was 18 and Ian was 19 and it's still one of my favourites. Ian gave it to me in a battered frame that he'd found in a charity shop that had no glass in it...and then decorated it with silver swirls and wrote a message down the side of the frame in silver pen...because that's the kind of gift you give when you still have a 'teen' on the end of your age. It's also the kind of gift you can't get rid of, even though everyone else who visits may look at it and wonder why we don't at least buy a frame that has some glass in it. I look at this photo and can't believe it was actually taken nearly 12 years ago...it feels like yesterday...

And this is my favourite photo of Ian...party because I don't think he knew I was taking it and I think you get more of a sense of what the person's actually truly like when there's no self-consciousness. A bit like that odd thing that has only happened to me a handful of times, but is so wonderful when it does - does this ever happen to you? - where maybe you're waiting for your husband/partner to come and meet you somewhere and suddenly they come into view and you see them in a crowd before you have a chance to separate them out and realise that it's actually your own partner...and as you watch them come towards you for a split second you get a sense of what they look like to everyone else, an independent being without all your own connotations of your everyday life together that you attach to your usual vision of them. And it's so perfect when this happens and you actually like what you see; a person who looks kind and that you'd like to know and who even looks a little bit scrumptious to you and it reaffirms that you have very definitely made the right choice!