Twenty

Image via WikipediaToday is our twentieth wedding anniversary. This day in 1991, Father Patrick Cooney married us at the Cathedral in Ennis. We had Irish traditional music instead of organ music at the wedding, then everyone trooped across the road to the Old Ground Hotel for a reception on the lawn followed by a dinner in the Flag Room. There was an awful lot of Irish music about, mainly because Sarah's family were all involved in music and we had some of the country's finest with us that day playing in the church, on the lawn and then, once the band had done their repertoire of wedding songs, an impromptu seisiún.

We also had the first day of sunshine in Ireland that year.

We spent our first night 'legally', as my best man so helpfully pointed out in his speech, in the Old Ground's De Valera Suite, where the great man himself had once slept. Above the kitchen, it smelled of boiled cabbages. No wonder Dev was grumpy.


There was no Internet, no tweets from the church or even mobile phones to go diddledoodoodiddledoodoodiddledoodoodee in the quiet bits (like just after you've been asked if you 'do'). Our photographer, Liam Hogan, used one of those things with a bellows and took so long to set up each shot we were left with acheing cheeks and a set of pictures in which we look not unlike slightly stunned waxworks. Nowadays he's got a website where he uploads his digital creations!

We don't usually make a fuss of our anniversary. One year, we both managed to forget it entirely. But tonight we'll be having a bottle of pop or so.