I will never forget how we couldn’t decide for ages on the song for our first dance and in the end Jenny suggested ‘The Garden’ by Van the Man. She always seemed so at peace when she played it and as we moved slowly on the dance floor together she made some joke about it being entirely irrelevant to love and I told her that it was perfect. She beamed with her own perfection and I felt so proud that she had chosen me to have this dance with.

I know now that it was the right thing to allow Jenny to sort out the venue for our wedding – that perfect place in Wicklow, where there was a great big open space at the back of the hotel, and the added bonus of a walled garden with its formality of box hedging and bursts of colour from the montbretia and the terracotta pots distributed amongst the beds filled with rich pelargoniums. I have always loved these plants, they remind me of the West and the trips we took there, just the two of us and then later with the children.

I laugh to myself about how Jenny had insisted on playing her music on the way to Connemara and how the children looked horrified as she sang along to the Cure and despite the shrieks of objection coming from them, Jenny continued and the children became car sick from laughing. Jenny too, there was something about her on that trip – her flushed face, a kind of radiance as though she’d left behind a trouble or a worry. And the excitement of choosing who would sleep where and the enthusiasm of her picking wild flowers and grasses in the meadow outside the cottage.

I know that the thing that struck Jenny most about Connemara was the peace. It took two days to fully realize it but it came to her in the end. Two whole days to register that level of relaxation overtaking the body and I agreed with her wholeheartedly – it wasn’t a sudden sense of quiet that you got when you reached smaller roads and began to notice the appearance of dry stone walls. It was more gradual and it was like recognizing Geist, creeping into your corporeal being and triggering all the sense pleasures you could find there in the recess of your mind.

I feel glad that I had showed her a place where she could be herself and feel wild and free and we made love when the children were playing outside the cottage and afterwards we went out, wrapped in dressing-gowns to check on them. I believe that in that special moment I felt so proud to have this family. The pleasure that I derived from these people in my life was immense and I felt so fortunate, so much so that I had difficulty measuring it.