A mammoth undertaking

This blog was originally started by my late husband Christopher, to document living with and – as it turned out – dying of cancer. I then kept it up, covering rebuilding my life again. Over the past nearly eleven years, I’ve been renovating the house, working possibly too hard (especially at the end of the financial years), and have scattered Christopher’s ashes in interesting places on three continents.
I think on the whole I’ve done a reasonable job of getting on with things. I will never forget Christopher, but his absence isn’t such a raw, gaping hole in my life as it was at first.

Yesterday I got married, in a very small COVID-compliant wedding at Malvern’s Council House. D is a very private person, so I haven’t mentioned him much on this blog, but he has been very much a fixture of my life for a good few years now. It was about time we regularised the situation.

Malvern Council House has a very pleasant Wedding Room, with high ceilings and tall windows overlooking the Winter Gardens. Due to COVID restrictions, we were only allowed a handful of guests. The witnesses were Christopher’s best friend, and the ex-boss of both D and me. The boss’s wife used to be a Registrar, and she kindly agreed to come out of retirement to marry us. So that was lovely. After the short ceremony, we took our witnesses to a newly-reopened local gastropub for lunch – outdoors on the patio under a gazebo due to the present restrictions. It was sunny, but very cold – though fortunately the pub supplied blankets to wrap up warm with!

We were meant to be going on honeymoon to a rather posh hotel in the Cotswolds, but have had to cancel that as the hotels aren’t open yet. But never mind – we can go somewhere later this year. Or next year. Or whenever travel is possible again. That’s not really that important in the grand scheme of things.

Overall now, I think this blog has run its purpose. I’ve noticed that I’ve been posting less frequently over the past year. So I intend to close this chapter of my life, and move on. Thank you to everyone who has read the blog over the years and commented – your support really did make a huge difference, both to Christopher at first and subsequently to me.