Thirty-two years ago today Pip and I got married. It was a leap year and we’d rather fancied the 29th, but Finsbury Town Hall, where the deed was done, wasn’t available, so we settled on the 28th.

It was a fine building, officially opened in 1894 as Clerkenwell Town Hall by the Prime Minister of the day, Lord Rosebery, who I’ve learnt since was considered by his peers to have failed to live up to his potential, which could have been cut and pasted from any of my school reports. It’s now a performing arts academy providing training in dance and musical theatre.

Though unborn at the time, our daughter, Josie, already ripening in our loved up hearts, went on to choose the very same career, her first post qualifying job being on the West End stage performing in Les Miserables, where she met her beau, Lauren, with whom she now lives a few miles down the road.

But it wasn’t all love and roses. On the day we married a bomb went off at London Bridge Station during the morning rush hour, causing significant damage and misery for the twenty-nine people who were injured. But we danced into the early hours.

And here I am, on our anniversary, thirty-two years on, sitting on a wall by the sea in warm, morning sunshine beside a row of screeching parakeets (pictured above), wishing she was here but feasting on a wealth of happy memories instead.

We’re heading home tomorrow, so that’s it for now. I’m blogging off.

Hasta La Vista!