Remade…

What do you do with your rings when you get divorced? Mine were pretty ordinary, to be honest. It’s not like I’d got a rock and a hunk of gold that would be worth selling. My (now ex) husband and I had gone ring shopping together, at my insistence, the day after he’d proposed.

It hadn’t been a classically romantic moment. I was driving south in the middle lane of the A1M just north of Ferrybridge — famous for its power station — when he asked the question. We were in the garden — if that’s not too grand a word for a scrap of grass with some picnic tables — of the Little Chef a few miles further south, when I answered it. There wasn’t going to be a ring until three weeks later, when he got paid, but I didn’t want to wait that long. I wanted to share our news and I wanted to show people a ring. So the next day, I went looking for reasonably priced jewellers in my lunch break and we met after work to buy a ring together. I paid for it. He paid me back at the end of the month. It cost considerably less than £100. But it had a little sapphire and a couple of tiny diamonds and I loved it. My wedding ring was equally modest.

Wedding and engagement rings are particularly intimate things, I think. You wear them for so long. We were married for about twenty years. A lot of life happened in that time, and they were constant companions. So while I didn’t want to wear them again, I didn’t want to throw them away either. They were sat in a box in my bedroom and I would occasionally come across them.