Fiona's Basket

The Force That Through the Green Fuse

Hello Dear Reader

Tomorrow is my nineteenth wedding anniversary which in new money is quite a long time but in old money it’s practically all fur coat and no knickers. Being the superstitious sort, and not one to take anything for granted, I shall offer no great pronouncements on how one reaches a medium-to-long relationship milestone. Experience, and the performative social media posts of other people, have proven that the moment you proclaim to all and sundry you’ve nailed this marriage business, the other party serves you with divorce papers. Not for me the posed clinking of glasses against an easyJet city-break sunset, no siree.

Tomorrow is also my parents’ thirty-ninth wedding anniversary. Now, the eagle-eyed among you might be scratching your heads at this because, alas, I am a long way from thirty-nine but not so my younger sister who was a five month old foetus smuggled under the froth and hoops of my mother’s ice white Berketex bridal gown. Nowadays it’s all the rage for children to attend their parents’ weddings and who am I to judge but when I think of February 14th 1987, I remember it as the day my mother put me in a candy pink lace and satin thing she’d run up on her overlocker in her spare time and the pudding was something called Fiona’s Basket. I’ve not a clue who Fiona was or what she had to do with these nuptials, or why the chef thought chocolate lacing was good idea in 104 degrees. I just know that I was very grateful that my parents had had the good sense to conduct this wedding in Australia and not Jersey so that after years of having to pretend they had always been married and the only reason they didn’t have any photos was because of an unfortunate house fire, I was able to return to school dignity intact.

My parents have been together for fifty-four years. Their secret is that my dad was married to someone else for fifteen of those years. I mean, it works for them, so who knows, maybe give it a try.

As if by magic, this very moment my maid-of-honour sent me a photo from our wedding day.

I was up-the-duff in this photo with a baby my husband was convinced would be a girl and whom we had to name Miranda Amanda Natalie Chatterley. Miranda Amanda Natalie Chatterley should have said hello to the world some time in October of that year, but perhaps she was blessed with the gift of clairvoyance and took one look at the state of things in 2026 and thought nah, maybe not. She went back to wherever those non-corporeal souls go to the day my episode of Live from Abbey Road aired. We lay on the sofa that night watching it, shell-shocked, wondering if it was true, wondering if life was a Faustian pact after all.

Every year for the last few years, I look up what the flower is for that anniversary year and plant seeds accordingly. This year it is chrysanthemum.

It never ceases to take my breath away when those seedlings first appear through the black soil. How do they do it? How do they know what to do? How poignant it is when one or two of them still have the husk of the seed hanging off a tiny leaf! How can these tiny things become so tenacious, like the statice from our sixteenth wedding anniversary which has now self seeded all over our garden and thrives even through the harshest winter.

‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age’

I think about these lines from the Dylan Thomas poem a lot. What is that force, that pushes seeds through the earth, that has trees wither in winter and explode into life in spring; that finds two small people from a little island and throws them together at random to make a whole other soul out of nothing?

It can only be love, I think. I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than that.

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx