17

 We're into the silent, empty years of wedding anniversaries now. Sixteen through to nineteen are the non-entities, becoming memorable again at twenty with a bit of porcelain. Sponsored by Armitage Shanks, no doubt. That's not the worst anniversary so far: there's "tin", (10th) and "salt", (8th) "Wool", (7th) and the first and second anniversaries are both either paper or cotton. Those are the traditional anniversary themes. But A.I. has different ideas. 

What's A.I., you ask. Like so many things, you won't be sorry you missed this, Kelly. A.I. is artificial intelligence, but don't worry, we don't have robots doing all the mundane tasks so we can live lives of sybaritic excess. No FOMO, Mullan. What's happened instead, is humans still put the bins out, wipe bums in care homes and get blown up in wars, (and we're having a shit load of them at the moment) while the robots write film scripts and compose music and generate endless digital slop. Today I saw an A.I. manufactured episode of Crossroads involving a fire in the motel, an ostrich running round reception, and Noelle Gordon's wig falling off. The Crossroads fans thought this was the funniest thing they'd ever seen. 

Idiocracy was a speculative documentary. 

Idiocracy came out the year we met. I don't think we ever saw it. 

So, A.I. reckons, because when A.I. doesn't know something it's happy to make stuff up, it reckons 17 is the amethyst anniversary. I looked up the qualities of the amethyst and found several useful properties on various healing sites. This is what I do now - scour the internet for absurdities and turn them into books. You'd be so proud. The amethyst, apparently, soothes irritability and enhances intuition. It's good for stress, spirituality and, rather mundanely, headaches. 

Amethyst has a hardness rating of 7 on the Mohs scale, (dunno what that is) is a violet/purple colour and has a "vitreous lustre". Nothing says seventeen years of marriage like a vitreous lustre. 

Of course, we didn't get 17 years of marriage. We never even made our third wedding anniversary. Just paper and cotton, for us. Or cotton and paper, depending who you ask. Leather is number 3. We never made leather. 

Good news for cows, at least. 

A.I. also tells me that the traditional gifts for a 17th anniversary are furniture, which is, at least, bitterly ironic, and shells, symbolising "protection, comfort and good fortune" which is, at least, bitterly ironic. 

There are only two pieces of furniture in the house you'd recognise: that great hulking rosewood cupboard, which we brought back from a junk shop in Finsbury Park in great, twisting lurches, in which we kept all our painting and drawing stuff, and all of my millions of cheapo notebooks. It still contains all those things. There's also the television table that we bought cheap in Ikea and you painted red. It's still red, only slightly chipped, and it's still holding up the telly. Sadly not the one we got for the wedding, which died a death. Henry the hoover, however, which we bought in Brixton, and I carried all the way down Coldharbour Lane because we couldn't afford the bus fare, is still going strong, which makes one of us. I can barely lug him up the stairs these days. 

This was the furniture we had and we didn't have much more. It was a bare sort of life, but we didn't mind much then. We had each other. 

No shells, though. No amethysts. No leather.