I sometimes feel lately as if I am living in some Victorian novel. When I was teaching there was a story that got trotted out so regularly in assembly, it must have been in the front of the Big Book of 100 Stories for Assembly for head teachers.
In this Victorian tale, a devoted husband and wife are a handsome couple. She has beautiful long hair which she combs a hundred strokes every night and is very proud of but she has no hair ornament to put in it. He has that most Victorian item of personal technology, a pocket watch, which he cannot keep on display dangling from his waistcoat for he has no watch chain. On Christmas morn she arrives downstairs shorn, having sold her hair to buy him a watch chain for the watch he has sold to buy her a hair comb.
Amazingly this was never told as a warning tale against stupidity in marriage.
However I felt I might be a small but dim part of this yesterday.
The S&H took many months to consider the engagement ring for his beloved. Knowing of my fondness for jewellery, which I did make as a table top business at one point, he put all he had gleaned together and bought a very nice trilliant cut Tanzanite online, then designed the setting and had a friend make it, the entire exercise ending up costing £600, ouch. He then ignored all hints from his intended and ring chats and did the job properly, asking her father for her hand first before proposing in a romantic setting on a holiday in Scotland he gave her for a Christmas present.
So far so good.
Then her father, who already knew he was ill with incurable cancer, was told he had not months but weeks to live, which is when the wedding got planned for the earliest date available April 4th, four weeks away.
After eighteen months of looking after my mother at a distance we are beyond skint and I have had little opportunity to earn. I haven’t had the kiln on since my father died. Moreover our son has been living with us for two years and we were only existing on my husband’s occupational pension to begin with. The S&H lost his last client before Christmas. I have emptied the savings to give the bride and groom some sort of honeymoon because otherwise after the wedding, she was going to go back to her flat and he was going to come back home with us.
But they need wedding rings.
We went into the new local jeweller, an offshoot of a Birmingham company. This is a good thing, Birmingham is one of the jewellery towns of the world and a major manufacturing centre since the eighteenth century at least. The news was not good. Since the days 38 years ago when my wedding ring was bought for £30 at Ratners, the famously cheap national chain, the prices of gold have escalated beyond all sense or reason. My son tried on some bands and decided that 5mm wide looked OK on his thin little nerdy fingers and that, apparently, in 9ct, white gold would cost £200. The bride’s effort, however would have to be, even though only 3mm wide, bespoke made to go round the trilliant Tanzanite and that would cost £450.
So the S&H and I stood in the jewellers, terribly short of £650, no job, no prospects, skint. What to do?
So, after some thought at home, I took much of the jewellery I have collected over the past thirty odd years back into the jewellers to sell it for scrap value. He was very decent and said he would not make money on the sale but treat it as cash and weighed it all, gold and silver to buy it in at £9-50 per gram for gold and £2 per gram for silver and nothing at all for the stones.
I was shocked, though I already knew that buying is not the same as selling. I had taken everything heavy including the heavy silver bangle my husband had given me when we were engaged but not my wedding ring, or my husband’s and the whole lot, two carrier bags full before I decanted them from the boxes, came to £400 in gold and £50 for the silver.
We shook on the deal and my son handed over the engagement ring. The jeweller promised to get it done in time, which is quite some thing because the rings must go to the Birmingham assay office to be hall marked, which takes a week. Knowing craftsmen, I requested that the jeweller not the hassle the goldsmith and he promised to ask the smith to do it on a day when his heart was full of love and creativity, and I believe he will do that.
So what jewellery will I be wearing at my son’s wedding? Cardboard bangle and a plastic watch, possibly. But that’s OK, it will go with the fascinator that I bought off Amazon for £4-99, which is all that I’m getting new to wear because I gave the S&H my last £20 for a new pair of trousers for his one day honeymoon in a posh hotel.
Some days I feel as if I am living in a Victorian novel but, just as long as I don’t end up in the workhouse and can make up the £200 shortfall at Miniatura, I’ll be OK.
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JaneLaverick.com – we all lived in one clog and then we sold our toenails and moved to a bigger clog and then we fell on hard times and moved downmarket to a slipper.