My wife's 60th b-d? 19 2 25 (11) 25 2 3

2019 02 24

Did you ever go to a really sumptuous party and if so were you aware of it at the time?



Well in my smart phone I have a memory stick of 30 GB capacity where amongst other things I collect old pics of past events: birthday parties, holiday snaps, wedding celebrations and such stuff, and mostly these were taken from my pc archives of digitised pics, which is to say pretty much all the pics that have ever been taken for they get scanned by my son or his son these days, even old transparencies jump over the printed pic to become a scanned digitised pic. And because of the great size of some of these images in terms of pixels of data, whenever I have free time I'll reduce them to a vga (video graphic array), that's a miniature representation, to release memory for other things. 

Far from such activity being seen as a chore I have come to realise recently it puts me in touch with my past in a most rewarding way, by re-visiting these old occasions. Like last night after going to bed without being really tired because I had had a nap during the day I edited pics from a file that had lain unvisited some considerable time, the occasion of one of my wife's big birthdays, only to reflect subsequently it could well have been the most sumptuous party I ever attended..?

The way it came into being in a way followed on after my own such bash some years before, an altogether more modest affair, which I had my Mam arrange for me when I reflected we had a great bash for her when she was 80, and when I considered it too long to await her 90th, a good few years hence, because she might not be so up for one herself then…

So A-E announced she was going to have a 60th, when we hired one of the two sailing club houses in our town, the one which in July has the most beautiful sun-sets over the sea just outside, and when all told there must have been 120 guests. As the main Master of Ceremonies I gave my camera to my younger son, P, to take pics of the guests as they arrived, so with A-E I could greet them, my son capturing everyone in their smart casual finery I had stipulated on the invitation cards. And after the toast, after everyone had arrived, I gave a short welcoming speech, and then proceeded to get pics of the guests seated in tables comprising 8 people per table, the tables being disposed, in a circle as you went round the room, when I had spent an age seating everyone with name tags: putting people with young children as far away as possible from the area where a group of musicians provided entertainment throughout the evening, and endeavouring to choose convivial dinner partners for all the guests… The high-light of this for all the youngsters both from UK and Finland was when a singer dressed up as Elvis Presley and gave a good account of his rendition of Elvis in his Las Vegas hay days with Presley songs.



Sixty is a good time in life to stage one of these occasions when one has pretty much safely succeeded the older generation, who at this time of life have pretty much passed on, whilst still being active in many different spheres. So A-E had tables filled with all her old childhood girlfriends, with a few second cousins to partner them; tables with her business colleagues with their spouses, many of whom one was meeting for the first time, and then people from both our families, from UK and here in Scandinavia, with many members of the next generation of children, and in a fair number of cases accompanied by the older ones of their children. Then because my wife was a Tourist Guide for the town in which we live, she had another table reserved for guides, plus of course a collection of our friends with whom we socialise most.




At the time it all seemed a bit frenetic when one wasn’t able to get round everyone to chat with, like one couple who we used to socialise with when we lived in UK, who just happened to visiting their home country during that particular summer, whom we didn’t get round to talking to properly. But then again looking back now from a good many years down the road, it is amazing to acknowledge that so many of this particular gathering are no longer with us when the sumptuousness of the occasion is further high-lighted and brought into focus…

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