The Fall Zone

At half past three on Saturday the twenty-sixth of September the wind dropped to about a three, the cloud broke up over Scolt, and eighty-four people stood on Chapel Rise in coats over good clothes, thirty-two metres back from a two-hundred-year-old holm oak, outside a hundred and twenty metres of blue rope and forty hedging stakes that I had put in the ground on my knees in the rain.

There were twelve of us under the tree.

Cleo and Dev. Mrs Shaw, the registrar, who had come from Fakenham and who had never in her career conducted a ceremony with a man in a boat playing a fiddle a hundred feet below her, and who said so, twice, with pleasure. Arun and me, holding the flowers and the ring respectively and both convinced we were about to drop them. Rekha and Anil. Susannah, who had somehow been included and had…