He went to the coffee shop without me. “I’ve sad news for you,” he said when he called to say where he was sitting and to tell me who he’d spoken to and who had made him his coffee. “The wedding is off,” he said, “Posh and Becks have split up, and apparently she’s going round telling everyone that he hit her.” I am sorry. They both deserve something like happiness. And it’s hard to be in a small town when something they’ve puffed up with hopes and dreams and all that fairytale detail is punctured. I am sorry for him mostly. But it doesn’t sound like anyone he spoke to was laughing. “It’s more likely that she hit him,” Jack Russell’s mum said.
They talked about the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. She was almost thirteen at the time, he was six. They had no TV, no one did back then, at least not here. So there were no moving pictures, no real focus, other than the ‘street-party’ that was held in someone’s garage. She remembered it being a dull day. Neither of them could remember what day of the week it was. Apparently someone gave her a coach and horses as a souvenir. She kept it for some time. They had jelly and sandwiches and the women of the street served them the food. He remembers the event through the photos he saw, and kept pouring over, in the magazines from the time. It seems that that was enough to cement it in his mind. And hers. I do like to hear them talk about such things. A life lived before me.
