We Renew Our Wedding Vows. Annually.

This year we would enjoy receiving a 64-inch smart TV. Thanks in advance!

Mrs.Mendelsohn (she prefers the original. legal spelling) and I have been together long enough to have a bulging storehouse of zany traditions. On leaving somewhere, however salubrious, however agreeable, I have trained her to say, “Let’s get out of this godforsaken hellhole,” sort of as Dorothy Parker is thought to have answered her telephone (in a days when one didn’t know who was calling until hearing his or her voice) by asking, “What fresh hell is this?” Every morning we have a little two-person parade in our tiny living room, singing a song whose lyrics are

We have a parade
We have a bag parade
Paradey parade
A big parade!

These are all good for the soul, but we’re not lacking for a tradition that enriches us materially. Every May, a day or two after my birthday, we send out around 230 postcards, text messages, and emails to family ’n’ friends informing them that we have decided, for our anniversary (May 18), to renew our wedding vows.

In May 2008, Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) throw her bridal bouquet to the baying bachelorettes right-handed, for reasons I have never been able to persuade her to explain. I, in the meantime, try to pacify the paparazzi.

Our friends and acquaintances are mostly actors, writers, abstract expressionsts, polemicists, or supermarket cashiers, drama queens — nobody’s fools, in other words. Having realized that we renew our vows every May, many have stopped sending congratulatory messages, let alone gifts. But every year at least a few people come through for us. Last year, for instance, we received two Ninja air fryers, a 2008 Nissan Qashqai that we donated to a local charitable organization because there’s nowhere to park in southwest London, several bottles of very high-end olive oil from a variety of olive oil-producing countries, a subscription to Condè Nast Traveler, and two memberships at the nearby Hawker YMCA, which we cancelled late last year on learning that Donald Trump is a Village People fan, of all things.

Even at my age, I am able to remember some things about our wedding. Two slaves of a dominatrix friend of Mrs. Mendelsohn played the clarinet and piano, respectfully, and a then-friend of mine with a significant drinking problem, accompanied him very drunkenly on the guitar even though he didn’t known any of the duo’s songs. My best woman, Mistress Antoinette, the only person who’d come over from the groom’s native country, amazed me with her social fluency, going up to a succession of perfect (or, in the case of the drunken guitarist, significantly imperfect) strangers and striking up conversations by complimenting them on their attire. (She has since ceased speaking to me, for reasons she declines to confide.)

The bride took off her white stilettos, became four inches shorter, and threw her bridal bouquet to the shrieking bachelorettes with her right hand, though she is an admitted southpaw, and unashamed of it, my implacable importuning to the contrary notwithstanding. Long after all our guests had pissed off home, we stood forever in the North London cold waiting for the taxi Mrs. Mendelsohn claimed to have summoned.

“But we’re the fucking bride and groom!” I noted bitterly over and over again.

“It’ll get here when it gets here,” Mrs. Mendelsohn observed, and she was right, as, over the years, she has been about so many things.