Ring a Ring a Roses

I have been married twice, and have had three wedding rings. The first was a second hand ring, which was selected as a result of lack of finance. I quickly developed a rash on my finger, and abandoned wearing it. Shortly after, I replaced it with an eight strand silver puzzle ring, which caused the same problem. In addition to the problem of my reaction to it was that they both scratched easily and hindered my dexterity when attempting card manipulation (I am a hobby magican).


On getting married to the current long suffering wife, I got the ring I had longed for. No gold for me, this is the real deal. A thick platinum band that cost – well a lot. And no off the shelf number either. Oh no, this was made for me. The same jeweller made my wife's engagement and wedding ring. We looked for a long time for an engagement ring, and with her deep dislike of big sparkly diamonds, the task was not easy. At last, in the window of an expensive jewellry shop my wife spotted a ring that she fell in love with. The price tag? A snip at £2000. We took a photo of the ring, and visited a jeweller who made rings to measure and he priced up the ring at a tenth of the cost. He got a selection of stones in and we picked together the ones we wanted. The ring is beautiful.


As I have continued to eat my fingers have become slightly bigger and soon my ring became unwearable. My wife, however, takes her's off only if showering or washing up. It was then somewhat of a distressing thought to her that her fingers might swell a little in pregnancy and that she would need to remove her rings, and so she resisted. And resisted. Till yesterday her finger was swollen and the rings wouldn’t come off. With tears streaming down her face we went to the local fire station and had them cut her rings off her. All is not lost, our jeweller will be able to repair them, but it got me thinking. What do we value and why? I value my marriage very highly, and would like to say the ring really isn’t a big deal to me. Yet even with it sitting in a ring box, it matters. It’s a symbol of the promises we exchanged, and so even though I don’t wear it, I would not willingly part with it.


We often watch a TV show in which people come have antiques valued and discovering they're great value are very keen to sell them. I look around my flat and realise I really haven't got anything that would fetch a high price; most of the things I own are things that other people didn’t want anymore, but they all have a significance, a value. They make me think of the people I got them from, or remind me of events that have happened around them. It's as if each item has a life of its own, that it is in some way soaked in the atmosphere and events it has witnessed. It comes as no surprise that some items are considered by some people magical. It is, then, all the more impressive, that for all the silver goblets, all the fine robes of Christendom, the sacred symbols; the items that contain the greatest value of all are water for baptism, bread, and wine. Maybe it is only through investing meaning and significance in such transient things that there is enough space left for them to contain all the meaning and significance we place on them. The simpler the item the more space left for significance. A simple band of precious metal, able to hold far more meaning for the individual than the most beautiful of paintings or well worded sonnet.


Yours as ever,

The Broken Man