A&I
12 · 06 · 2027
I. The Ceremony
The Signet Library
Three o’clock in the afternoon
Parliament Square
Edinburgh EH1 1RF
A glass pavilion at the water’s edge, twenty minutes’ walk from Nyhavn.
Seats from 13:30. The vows are short; the view is not.
Chapter one
Our Story
We met in the back room of a letterpress studio one February, both reaching for the same drawer of 36-point type. One of us had booked the workshop. The other had come in out of the sleet looking for coffee and was too polite to leave. By the end of the afternoon there was a poster that read GOOD MORNING upside down, and it was kept.
The running disagreement: one of us holds that cycling to work through horizontal rain builds character. The other holds that it is a human-rights matter, and has filed several formal complaints, on paper, set by hand. Neither expects to win. Both are quietly delighted to have forty more years to argue it.
Last September, three weekends went into setting a single line of type at that same studio. It came out backwards, the kerning was questionable, and there was a lowercase q where the question mark should have been. It was proofread twice, corrected in pencil, and answered yes.
