Nine years, told properly

The short version is on the front. This is the one with the dog in it.

Harriet and Ivo walking out of the chapel doorway hand in hand, into the late sun.

The fire alarm

Farringdon Road, March 2018, a Tuesday. Ivo had come out of a dentist's waiting room two doors down and joined the wrong evacuation. Harriet was holding a coffee for a colleague who never appeared. We stood there for forty minutes and neither of us went back inside.

The flat with the boiler

Two years in a first floor on Wilberforce Road with a boiler that could be persuaded but not repaired. We learned that we argue about nothing, cook well together, and cannot share a desk.

Mabel

A lurcher of uncertain provenance, adopted in 2021, who walks at exactly the speed she has decided on. She will be at the mill for the ceremony and then, firmly, in the cottage.

The mill

Ivo's grandparents, Peggy and Alan, were married at Harnaby in October 1961 with sixteen people and a cake made by a neighbour. We went to look at it in June last year, mostly out of curiosity, and were still standing in the yard an hour later.

Peggy is ninety-four and will be in the front row.

Harriet and Ivo close together in the low sun, mid-sentence.