Wedding rings

I went shopping at the weekend. It was a bit of an impromptu, ever-so-slightly hungover trip to Leeds city centre, and began in an unassuming fashion: there was the obligatory scout around the O’Neill store, a quick dive into M&S and a fairly depressing visit to Topshop where I banged straight into one of my 6^th form students and subsequently realised I’m now officially too old to shop there. Gah. There’s nothing like a lithe 17-year-old to make you feel , well, past it.

Adam, probably desperate to get out of the aforementioned Topshop, suggested we go and look at some rings. Wedding rings. It was pissing it down, and although I’d bought a hoody and a pair of shoes, just about everything I’d tried on so far was – well – not quite right. You have those days, don’t you? They don’t have it in your size, or they have it in navy but not red.  Nothing suited.    

So we tripped off to Yorkshire Jewellery – an independent jewellery shop in the Victoria Quarter in Leeds – in a not-entirely-hopeful fashion. The VQ, if you’ve never been before, is late-Victorian design at its best – all glass and polish and fine frippery. Vivienne Westwood has a little boutique there, and even the ‘high street’ stores are at the top end of scale – Reiss, LK Bennett, Whistles (be still, my beating heart). In short, it’s a little bit posh.

Saying that, though, Yorkshire Jewellery is actually a bit of an anomaly amongst all of those other ‘fancy’ retail units. I’d long-admired the second-hand and vintage jewellery in the window, but it doesn’t really have a ‘wow’ factor. No burly security guards with earpieces, unlike the big high street jeweller around the corner, and certainly no snotty sales assistant. The lady, in fact, was lovely. Bejewelled and lovely. She clearly liked her rings, and necklaces.

And so we pored over a couple of velvet trays and muckied up her shiny glass counter with our finger prints as we tried rings on. We looked at them in a mirror, turned them this way and that and considered the prospect of wearing one of those bands for a lifetime.

It’s an odd purchase, a wedding ring. “Do I like this enough to wear it…forever?”

And the good news is – well, I do.