Where It All Began

Next month we celebrate our 45th anniversary and it all started here. Where is here - if you recognize the backdrop of Old Sarum you will, of course, know this is Salisbury. After university I started a graduate fast track job with National Westminster Bank here and shared a flat with 4 of my bank colleagues. Not long afterwards my 3 year relationship with a fellow student at Kent fell apart and I was wondering what life would hold in the future.

I found a church just round the corner - St Paul’s Anglican Church and at only my second shared meal at the Rectory, a young woman appeared who had not been there the week before. We ended up spending the whole evening chatting. Turns out she was training as a nurse and invited me to meet more people at a Nurses Christian Fellowship. This then led to dinner in her tiny nurses quarters with a couple of her friends. They soon disappeared and to cut a long story short, we ended up getting married in that same church, St Paul’s in Salisbury. In time all thee of our sons were born in the hospital where L did her training before we moved on. Ever since then we have almost always spent some time in this city that is not only familiar, but ticks so many boxes that we love about England. The Cathedral is magnificent, many pubs still belong in an era before many in the country were taken over by big business. The Tuesday market is always humming and full of a fascinating array of stalls. We always see the bench where the Skripals were found close to death after they had been poisoned by Putin and the walk down the river from this campsite is something we do each day we are here. Good memories, new ones to make and it just feels so good to be back here once again.

In other news, we had a lovely lunch with Adrian and Val and I can now stop driving for 6 days after the 4,000 kms undertaken in our European trek. Satisfied sigh exhaled and the sun just went down so it’s time for a snooze and rest up before we walk into the city tomorrow.