Just married, at 57!
You decide to wed after years with your partner. But how does it change things? And is there any need? Here, comedian and author Jenny Eclair reveals, with great honesty, what it meant for her…
Jenny Eclair reveals why she finally decided to tie the knot
Last weekend, the old man and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Well done us, we’d made it! Just 12 months earlier I’d marched down a non-existent aisle in a small annexe of our local art gallery in Camberwell, south London, with my 28-year-old daughter as bridesmaid beside me and said ‘I do’ to the man I had been living with for 35 years. Geof and I met in 1982. At the time, I was living in a flat with Ruth, the wife of pop star Joe Jackson, while he toured America. Ruth and I both worked in a local wine bar and I’d just begun performing punk poetry in various pubs across the capital. I was 22 and, at that time, still in the grip of anorexia, a horrid disease, which I seemed to have picked up at
‘We’d been together seven years when I got pregnant’
drama school a few years earlier.
Geof was 34, recently divorced, with no kids, living somewhat conveniently a few doors down from Mr and Mrs Jackson’s pad.
I first spied him lying underneath an ancient racing Porsche, which he was fixing up. Back then he was thin enough to do this (in the intervening decades both of us have got unimaginably fat and there is no way either of us could crawl under a low-slung 1950s racing car without getting our arses wedged!). Sadly, the car didn’t survive our first year together – a reversing lorry crushed it – but at least we weren’t in it at the time and, by then, I had my feet firmly under his kitchen table.
Not that he had a kitchen table. When I first moved in, Geof was going through a very minimalist phase (he’s a designer)
and, at the time, he counted a large flat pebble in the sitting room as furniture. Gradually, I persuaded him to allow in a couple of easy chairs and one day he fashioned a table out of some old scaffolding and sheet glass. Slowly but surely, we were creating a nest.
PARENT POWER
We’d been together seven years when I accidentally got pregnant, after finally restarting my periods when I was about 25.
I was lucky; there was never any question about not keeping the baby. Her father was on board from the start although, I confess, I took longer to come round to the idea, realising very quickly that I couldn’t give up performing to carry out this new role in my life.
Thankfully,
Geof made sure there was no danger of that happening. In fact,
I owe my career to him.
Phoebe was born in
1989 and, throughout the 1990s, when Geof was working as an art director for a TV magazine, he would come home and take over childcare duties, so that
I could go out and gig. And, no, much to my mother’s horror, I never once left him something in the oven for his tea! This was the decade when the three of us lived mostly on pasta, sandwiches and the occasional Indian takeaway.
No other babies ever appeared on the horizon – I think deep down I knew that, for me, one was enough, but together we formed a strange little tripod, a human triangle that remains unbroken to this day.
We chugged on, we did all the things that other young families did in those heady pre-recession days: we did up a house, shared the school run, went on holidays and got on with our lives. Marriage never crossed our minds; in fact, I’d become rather militant about it, despising the idea of being called Mrs Powell, and developing what seemed like an allergic reaction to anything bridal. After all, I was 40 when the new millennium dawned. I couldn’t understand why people were still playing this ridiculous and outdated patriarchal charade and, while I sympathised with the gay community for wanting equality in the marriage stakes, I also envied them their right to a civil partnership. To be honest, I still think a civil partnership should be an option for straight couples who don’t want to get married, but that’s another argument. The fact is, I couldn’t see myself getting married, ever.
So what changed my mind? Well, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that my accountant had something to do with it.
TAXING PROBLEMS
The truth of the matter is that unmarried couples are very vulnerable when it comes to inheritance tax. Basically, unless you do the paperwork and tie the knot, you both get clobbered. If we didn’t get married, the only people who would really benefit when we kicked the bucket would be the Government. Suddenly, it didn’t make sense not to be sensible. My career has been really important to me – it has taken me to places I could never have gone to without gigging, it has made me vaguely recognisable (although there seems to be a ridiculous number of people who can’t tell the difference between me and Su Pollard), it has contributed to paying the household bills, and paid for a cleaner and childcare, food and clothing.
I’ve paid a whacking amount of tax in my time, which is fair enough. I want my National Health and my bins collecting, thank you very much, but I don’t want to pay over the odds just because of my own sheer pig-headedness.
Dear reader, I gave in, on the proviso that the ceremony was small and quick➺