1 day ago
4
Diane and I had been living together for more than 30 years, and our children were 28 and 26 when we got civilled. We’d never wanted to get married. It seemed a bit too pipe and slippers. It also felt like tempting fate. We were really happy without being married, so why change things? And you can’t have more of a commitment than children. But we always said if they introduced civil partnerships for heterosexual couples, we’d get civilled.
I think friends assumed we did it primarily for tax reasons – to ensure that if one of us died, the other wasn’t left in the shit. There was an element of that. But more importantly, we actively wanted to get civilled. It actually felt really romantic – tying the civil knot as an expression of love after all this time together. It was such a beautiful day, in every way. 3 January 2020, just after civil partnerships had been legalised for opposite-sex couples, and we almost made history. We were only the fourth heterosexual couple to be civilled in Haringey. Get in!
The ceremony was short and super sweet. We had a lovely registrar (she beamed throughout and said it was the most “joyful” ceremony she’d officiated), we played some of our fave and most appropriate songs, dancing into the room to Jackie Wilson’s (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher followed by Stevie Wonder’s I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever) and closing with Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It is (To Be Loved By You). I was bucketing 30 years’ worth of tears when I made a speech and signed the book.
As well as being a great day, with hindsight, we also look back at it as an age of relative innocence. Covid was already circulating, but we were in blissful ignorance about what was round the corner, never having experienced a pandemic before, especially one involving a novel virus.
We just had close family there – my sister’s family, Diane’s sister’s family, the mums and Jimmy, who is our unofficially adopted son. We had a huge party planned for March, but it never happened because I got ill and (even if Boris Johnson didn’t think so) we thought it was irresponsible to get so many people together in the pandemic.
A few days after the planned party, the country went into lockdown. At the time, it was devastating not being able to get all our friends together. But every negative has an upside (well, lots do). We got to eat more than our share of the food, and gave away the rest of it to homelessness charities. And not having the party has made the ceremony even more of a memorable occasion.
I love this picture, taken by our older daughter, Alix, for lots of reasons. I find it really hard to smile naturally for the camera, but this is totally real – my smiliest smile ever. Diane seems pretty happy, too. I also love it because it’s the last time both our mums were together for an event, and both have since died. I’m sure they wanted to ask why we had to get civilled rather than married, but they just enjoyed the day instead. Finally, I love it because our younger daughter Maya is sitting so close to my mum, she looks as if she’s on her knee, which reminds me of old times.
