Diamonds

Like a lot of people, I find myself somewhat confused when it comes to my love of my family, in that whilst I would be devastated should anything befall any of them, I can really only tolerate them through the mediums of alcohol or of distance.

Regardless, I wanted to note that today is my paternal grandparent's diamond wedding anniversary. A slap-up meal awaits me, presumably to be held in awkward silence.

In all honest my grandparent's marriage, insofar as I am able to judge, having been alive for less than half of it and possessing no real metric upon which to judge it for perhaps half of the remainder, is remarkable in no real way than its sheer longevity. At present their marital recipe seems to be 60% fighting and 40% sleeping, which they presumably do in increasing fear that one of them will finally snap and claw the other's eyes out whilst they lie prone. On the other hand, it's worth noting that there is nobody in my generation (with, just maybe, the exception of C & T) who are liable to reach their diamond anniversary, not because all my married friends are headed for divorce (although a number of them have already fallen by an increasingly packed wayside), but because no-one did it early enough for both parties to realistically be alive long enough to hit the aforementioned milestone. I recognise that a long-lasting marriage is not necessarily the same as a happy one, and that getting married before you're old enough to drive a HGV is probably not the best idea society ever came up with, but it's still worth noting that until we find some way to live forever as cyborgs, or at least how to grow replacement organs from stem cells, my grandparents are liable to have achieved something their descendants will find very difficult to replicate.

Assuming, of course, they haven't got divorced before we've gotten to the fish course.