[338/365] divorce whiskey

I had a great weekend away, it turned out to be a chance to celebrate my divorce with an old friend whose divorce came through just before mine (this isn't as much a coincidence as it might seem; it's because we both took advantage of no-fault divorce starting to be a thing in England on a particular date this April).

He'd asked me a little while ago, when we were comparing notes on where the process was up to at that point, how long I had been married for. I had to do some math to figure it out: just short of seventeen years. Would've been seventeen in January.

He said his was something similar. And that he wanted to get a bottle of 18-year-old whisky to commemorate the occasion. We had some over the weekend, and he sent me home with my own bottle as a birthday present.

I really liked the idea of something that has been around longer than all of the time I was married. I was a much more sad and overwhelmed person at the time this was put into casks. I wouldn't swap places with them. But I wouldn't be (in metaphorical senses as well as the literal sense) where I am now without the choices my younger self made.

I'm so happy where I am now that I am grateful to them and very fond of them despite or because of their loneliness and their uncertainty.

My friend told me Friday evening that he'd gotten the email confirming his divorce had been finalized mere hours after he'd confirmed the desire to do so. I was a little worried that, having been told that it'd happen within two days unless there was some reason not to, I hadn't heard anything and Friday was the second of those two days.

It turned out though that I got the email almost exactly when I got home (after a prolonged journey!). As if to just round off the weekend nicely.