27th August 2025

 Marriage: Tomorrow we are off down to Shropshire to celebrate the wedding of Eleanor Daisy Riddy and Thomas Nicholas Opper Cunnane.  Tom of course carrying his grandfather's name forward, along with the Opper family in Switzerland and his father's name, who has slipped out of the picture over the years. We have rooms at Iscoyde Park (Sounds posh) and Andrew will pick up the three from London from the railway station at Whitchurch there. 

An engagement photo of Nick and myself

The couple are totally in love, Tom is so sweet around Ellie and of course it stirs memories from me when I remember his grandfather and how much we were in love as well.

Nick was taken so abruptly in a car accident when my daughter was about 3 years old.  The blackest of griefs the night my father-in-law came to my hotel bedroom and said that Nick had died at the hospital.  He went back to comfort Lotta and I faced the night wondering how would I go on living.  But I made the decision to go on because I had a young daughter to support. 

Nick had been educated in England, a Canterbury school I believe and then Oxford, he had hardly started out on life when it was cut down abruptly by a silly woman turning out of a driveway without checking that a car was coming.  

Nick had been to see his best friend David in Oxford.  David was an expert on concrete and Nick was selling some sort of early type computing machines.  I was just trying to remember where we lived at the time.  It was Frimley, near Woking.  My father-in-law had found us living in a wretched bungalow which dripped with condensation and was icily cold and he had given us a deposit for the Frimley house.

Nick and David

As my family was so at odds with each other, I more or less got adopted by the Opper family, we shared the tragedy of Nick's death, Lotta's youngest son.  And so in the holiday weeks Karen and I would go over to Blonay and stay there. 

Nick and I had happy times of course, we were going to buy one of those self assembly houses we had seen at an exhibition and build a home.  We went up to Oxford for parties and meeting David.

This was the time when British families working overseas sent their children to England to be educated, Nick had scars on his back where he had been beaten at school, he was dyslexic which obviously did not help.  The youngest of four children he was the baby of the family.  His sister Annabel, a Montessori teacher would come over to England and take him out to tea whilst he boarded at school. His other sister Sylvia, taught in Hong Kong and wrote, with someone else a book on Piaget and his teachings.  Whilst Mike the eldest had emigrated to Canada, to become a boxer, than  a lumberjack.

All this I write down for my family and for myself of course.  And maybe even for Taylor Swift, who announced her engagement to someone yesterday;)

Marriage and love is still not dead!

Ellie and Tom

Rebecca Solnit - Meditations in an emergency.  As always there is an edit ;)