Larkin about Markle and Harry


Richard Morrison writes in today’s Times in Scotland about how the about to be wed royal couple can learn a thing or two from long dead poet Philip Larkin. Seemingly the Windsor wedding day falls on Whit Saturday and the theory, at least, suggests that the wearing of white is appropriate for the Pentecostal weekend. Larkin’s take on the state of marriage is, he writes, ‘really, a meditation on marriage and what lies ahead for the travelling couples’. As the wedding train finally arrives at its destination Larkin, always the pessimist perhaps, writes gloomily about ‘a sense of falling, like an arrow shower, sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.’
As for Whit Saturday. Well, Google directs searchers to White Saturday which is seemingly the day after Black Friday which is the day when stores hike up prices to a level to which only the rich can aspire. Google aside, Richard suggests that the church festival of Whit Saturday was in fact well known in those heady pre-Google days of 1971 when he reckons that the moveable religious holiday was firmly trounced in ‘favour of a fixed and secularised spring bank holiday’. Don’t you just wish you could even spell secularised? 
So, there we have it. Whit Saturday is the day before Whit Sunday and falls on the day before the seventh Sunday after Easter. Easter of course falls on the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month that falls on or after the nominal day of the vernal equinox on the 21st March each year unless of course you hail from Samoa when the festival takes place on the second Sunday of October, with the Monday following being a designated public holiday.
Be that as it may, the media event of the decade takes place in the morning at Windsor as Meghan marries Harry and I wish them both well. But my brain hurts.

Larkin’s take on the state of marriage can be found on YouTube @: Larkin

Duncan Harley is the author of The A-Z of Curious Aberdeenshire

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