You'll each have a set of four

 

Happy New Year. Raise a glass. This glass. A 1970’s Waterford flute to be precise (quiet Tarquinius and Persephone I can hear you). Objects carry ritual and power. Particularly inherited objects and particularly these. .

Proudly purchased by my parents, in Ireland, at the Waterford factory, in a set of twelve. They took forever to arrive in HK where they lived. A place where such colonial niceties were considered essential, along with sit down black tie dinners for twelve. .

Twelve being the magic number because “there are three of you and you’ll each have a set of four”.

They symbolised, almost more than anything else, their joint ambitions. Looking at these beauties sparkling in the candlelight was confirmation - not too bloody bad for a young man from shabby genteel and a tearaway glamourpuss from country South Australia.
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Countless Christmases, New Years, valedictory champagne breakfasts and a move back to Australia later, we did indeed make the three sets of four. Of all the deeply hurtful challenges that have come my way over the last few years this was, oddly, in the top ten degree of difficulty. .
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Now this glass carries the fingerprints of friends and children and new layers of connection. When I feel the heaviness of the exact same flute that the Pen-A-Wen and the Wee Bro have in their hands, on the other side of the country, I understand that “you’ll each have a set of four” was about so much more than a glass.
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Auld Lang Syne my friends. 

Spare a thought for those in Australia who have lost all the things in the fires.