The day starts in an unlikely vein: by 8am, I’m not only up, but have been to the supermarket and made coconut porridge for the gang, rather than hollering from my bed at some time after 9 for a child to bring me tea. The sky is blue, the sun is warm. We pack up a picnic and toss a few coats in the car, just in case, because the sky has gone from golden blue to a shallower powder blue. By the time we get to our destination, it has become a disloyal shade of dove grey. I push away my nagging tiredness - who in the name of God gets up with a spring in their step at 6 fucking 45? - and try to ignore the fuzzing edge of my brain. It’s so incredibly beautiful here. That staves it off for a while. As we walk among the marble statues, I explain to the others about the hypocrisy of much female nudity in Modern Classical Art, the unpleasant legitimacy of buying and owning a nude woman who looks at you over her shoulder while vainly clutching a thin cloth over one breast, and how the same patriarchal path leads to the current dissing of selfies, where women and girls have in many cases reclaimed ownership of their image. My party asks if they can start on the picnic yet.
We shuffle around the gardens and the terrace of the big house, but it’s already too cold for me to joke to J that I’ll definitely have my second wedding here. Inside, a volunteer apologises that the house will be closing at 2 today, due to a wedding. Oh! I say, How lovely! The seating is laid out for the ceremony, two flanks of yellow-cushioned chairs filling a drawing room. I photograph the wallpaper and the mouldings, and I walk down the centre aisle and stand where the bride will be in a few hours. I look down at the chair right by me, aisle seat, front row. When I check a moment later, yes, the rest of the cards are printed - but this one, in careful biro writing, has the name of our flatmate from our first flat in London, nine years ago. Her name is reasonably unique, her spelling even more so.
Whoah, I say to J, I only just spoke to her, after years of companionable social media nods. She was looking for a reading for a wedding she was going to ohhhhhhh.
If this was a book, I add, this plot point would be savaged for its unlikeliness.