Lucky 13

Today is our wedding anniversary...13 years and counting. It's hard to believe the time has passed so quickly, and when I look at these photos we just seem so...well...young is the right word I guess! We were married in Vorden castle, with Holger and I travelling there in a carriage drawn by two beautiful Fresian horses. It was a gorgeous day; the fennel was blooming in clouds of tiny white blossom along the roadsides and as we clip-clopped through the forest on the way to the ceremony we felt like the only people in the world. Nervous, jittery, but so excited! After the ceremony, as we rode back through the woods the journey seemed so peaceful. Returning in the spring sunshine as man and wife, anything seemed possible and we felt very different to the people we had been just an hour before.

A lot has happened in those years of course, and we grew from a fresh faced couple to a family of four, moving away from Holland to Singapore and back again, changing jobs, buying a house, building up a life and home on the foundations of this one happy day. A lot of people think that there is no point in getting married any more, that if you're living together a marriage is just an expensive party and a piece of paper that doesn't make any real difference. However Holger and I feel completely differently about it. For us, getting married was the first step to building a life together, an opening chapter on 'us forever' rather than 'us until whenever'.

We may be a little older now, the wedding clothes may not fit quite as well and the faces are a little more lived in. But what we started that spring day has carried on and grown like a snow ball rolled across the ground and wherever we end up, we will look back and know that this is where it really began.