The boys are moving on

On Sunday, Annie was invited to meet Edwin in Bury for a shopping spree and a chat and ended up going to a Ukrainian lesbian wedding. Gay weddings are not permitted in Ukraine, so the couple seized the opportunity to hold the ceremony here while they are living in the UK while some of their relatives flew over to be with them.

Besides the wedding much has occurred in Maison Marr since last week. Edwin and Andre have finally signed and exchanged contracts for their first house; they and their dog, Morris, are to move out of Bury-St-Edmunds and into Newmarket. The boys will collect the keys tomorrow (Wednesday) and have invited us to visit the yet empty house on Thursday. As they are currently renting, they don't have to vacate their own property on the same day but will spend a week cleaning and preparing the place, with the intention of moving their furniture in the following Thursday. But not just their furniture: they have also earmarked our chesterfield, the piano, and a wardrobe to go on the van, so we spent the day looking for a new sofa and chair. Annie emptied the wardrobe and this morning I took three bags of clothes to the charity shop. By one of life's many coincidences, the boys' landlord phoned them just before they phoned him to give their notice; he is selling the house, so they have to leave anyway. He even offered them first refusal to buy the place! 

By another coincidence, a guy I have been corresponding with for some time about some papers we wrote turns out to not just be the same age as me but was also studying physics at Queen Mary College (now University) in the same three years that I was there. We each scarcely remember the other being there, but I do remember the project he had: to measure the thickness of dust on the moon using the radio telescope on the roof of the physics building by measuring infrared emissions before and during an eclipse of the moon. This was in the early 60's, before man had landed on the moon, when there was a fear that the dust layer might be so thick that the NASA lander could sink right into it. As a result of this and other work at QMC, the department was at the forefront of the moon landings and was given one of the rare samples of moon dust returned from the Apollo Eleven lander; I remember seeing it displayed in a glass case in the physics department when I returned some years later.