Tomorrow is Imogen’s (my 10 month old daughter’s) naming ceremony. After trying and failing to get all of our work done during the day today we’ve both been frantically rushing around getting prepared for welcoming thirty or forty family (and a few friends) over to the flat to give Imogen a proper welcome to the world.

It’s taken us all year to find the time to arrange it, and it in fact took about two false starts and a near total cancellation, but we finally pulled it together. It’s going to be lovely.

I’m sitting here now with the whole of the living room re-arranged, pink and silver helium balloons tastefully arranged around the top of the spiral staircase (this looks great when you come up the stairs, if I do say so myself!), most of the room in a new configuration of tables, sofas and chairs, and nearly everything stowed away and tidied… we’re nearly there!

I’m really looking forward to tomorrow. Being an atheist, we don’t do the whole ‘christening’ thing, but I do think that it’s important to welcome a new life into the world with a bit of a family get-together. To help us organise it, we have Victoria, a humanist ‘celebrant‘ (the word was new to me too). Basically, her job is to help us decide what we want to do on the day, design a short ceremony based around the kinds of things we’d like to do and then help make it run smoothly on the day.

The result is something of a mixture between family get-together, afternoon tea, champagne drinking, poetry reading, some music and a promise from a small number of people that they’ll be on hand to give Imogen support and help if she ever needs it.

But what I’m most worried about is that for some reason I decided that I wanted to sing the song that I’ve been singing to her for the past ten months on the day, and with a guitar.

Sounds simple right?

The problem is that I had never managed to play the guitar properly before about a month ago and I still can’t now, really, but I’m going to give it a go.

The images above are from what we have planned at the end of the ceremony - everyone gets to help plant a new tree for her, in this case a Japanese Maple or Acer - one of my favourite trees. You may have seen these - at a particular time of year they seem to take on a translucent scarlet glow at certain times of the day. Quite something.

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