Special days

[shewhomust]

Yesterday was an anniversary for us - not deliberately timed to fall on Saint Valentine's Eve. It dates back to the Dark Ages, when there was altogether less fuss about Saint Valentine's than there is now. Cards were sent, but gifts were definitely optional, and there certainly wasn't a full week of special menus in restaurants and romantic programming on TV and cinemas... But I digress.

It being our anniversary, we wanted to give ourselves some sort of treat. But first there was a day of jobs to be done and winter to be survived. Given a choice, we'd have gone swimming first thing - especially since, for some random reason, neither of us slept very well, and we were awake first thing. Given, instead, a heavy snowfall followed by a cold night, we decided to stay off the roads until they'd had a chance to thaw. So we did a morning's work, had lunch, did the supermarket shop we'd been putting off, and then, with the shopping still in the boot, went swimming. Late afternoon isn't an ideal time at the pool - it's busy, there's a class in the small pool (which means there are children swimming in random directions in the large pool, and the class teacher shouts a lot, so it's noisy). And they are liable to decide they need to adjust the depth of the pool, which they do by lowering the floor (a shiny piece of technology which keeps going wrong), so there are piercing blasts of the whistle, and everyone has to get out of the pool.

Despite all of which, we felt happier and more relaxed after swimming - even when one of the lenses fell out of durham_rambler's glasses (and he had to ask the staff for sellotape to hold it while he drove home), and it was a squeeze to get parked and unload the car. We'd thought about going out to dinner, and checked out a restaurant in town, but just not felt inspired to go there. It would've been fine, but it didn't make me feel enthusiastic about going out. And then we found a flier from the local chip shop. So...

So our romantic anniversary dinner was fish and chips, with a bottle of champagne we'd been given by a satisfied client - and I'm delighted to discover that chapagne really works with sish and chips. Even if you eat your chips with mayonnaise and haimisha pickled cucumbers. Dessert was blueberries and cream, and a slice of madeira cake, and a glass of madeira from the bottle that helenraven had given us a while back, and which I'd been saving for the perfect occasion.

After which we took the rest of the madeira upstairs, where it just got better and better through a documentary about the libraries of Timbuktu. The information on the bottle suggested serving it as an aperitif with salted nuts, but that would have meant treating it as a stage to move on from, a mere introduction to something else - which would have been a waste. We lingered over it - how can something so rich be so fresh, something so dry also be so full flavoured. And, er, did I mention alcoholic?

We stayed put and heckled the last of the Folk America series, a concert from the Barbican featuring some survivors of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene - Roger McGuinn, Judy Collins, Eric Andersen and Carolyn Hester, who ranged from the OK to the not really OK. The show was redeemed by compere Billy Bragg, who opened with a powerful, stripped down version of I ain't got no home in this world any more - and then came back later with the name we'd been waiting for, all through this series, and sang his own I dreamed I saw Phil Ochs last night.

All of which was pretty much unplanned, but I could have planned it for weeks and not put together a better evening together.