July 19th, 1976, was a Monday. I know that it was a Monday because that was the day that my elder daughter was born. Alice was premature, born a month before she was expected and the first time I ever saw her, she was wrapped in foil and lying in an incubator.
There was another new-born baby in that room; a boy who was also foil-wrapped in an incubator, receiving constant, vigilant attention from the medical staff.
He was noticeably bigger than Alice and his name, written on the notes attached to the incubator, was Solomon and that was appropriate as he had been born on a Monday.
I had never met anyone named Solomon before and I’ve never met one since. It is not a common name. I met Solomon’s mother a couple of times but I never saw his father.
Over four days, I spent many hours looking at the two babies as they were being fussed over by the nurses. They were both treated with boundless care and meticulous attention. Once they left though, I supposed that things might change because, as they would both find out, life isn’t fair.
I knew exactly what sort of life Alice was going home to and I recall wondering what future awaited Solomon.
While 20-year old Alice was at university, I read in the Evening Standard that a twenty-year old man had been found dead on a London street about seven miles from the hospital where Alice had been born. There was a photograph of the victim accompanying the story.
The photograph was of a young black man. I can’t remember his full name but I was startled when I saw that his first name was Solomon and Solomon, the baby who had been in the incubator next to Alice’s twenty years earlier, had also been black. Surely, it had to be the same person.
I know absolutely nothing at all about what kind of life Solomon had experienced or in what kind of home he grew up. The newspaper story revealed that his death was believed to be a result of feuding between gangs involved in drug dealing and so I doubt that he had experienced a stable, sheltered and financially secure upbringing.
I thought about Solomon again three years ago when Sarah, the daughter of someone I have known for a few years, invited us to her wedding reception; not to the wedding itself, but just to the reception.
Sarah is 31 years old and wants for nothing, materially. When she got married, she was earning less than £30,000 a year and yet she was already well established on the property ladder.
Sarah was married in a Register office. Only about 30 people - mainly family - were invited to the wedding.
However, more than 100 of her friends and family, and that included Caroline and me, were invited to the Reception six days later. There was an unconventional twist to this reception, however, in that it took place on an estate in Tuscany, some 850 miles away from the wedding venue.
I suspect this is probably because a Register office in Milton Keynes is not very Instagrammable. (I am told that instagrammable is the modern word for picturesque.)
The location of the “party” is 50 miles from the nearest airport and so all guests would either have had to hire a car at the airport or pay for a costly taxi ride. This was in addition to acquiring accommodation in central Italy for two nights at the height of the tourist season.
I estimated that the total cost of staging this event was about £115,000. You may be wondering how the couple could afford to spend a lot more than their joint annual salaries on what, when it came down to it, was nothing more than a social gathering. The answer is that, of course, they couldn’t.
Sarah, desperate to impress her friends who are more interested in the moment than the meaning, wanted to have the event captured for posterity on Instagram and Facebook so that everyone can see how special she is. Luckily, her future mother-in-law is the divorced wife of a multi-millionaire.
She told Sarah that, as her own daughter’s wedding two years earlier had cost a lot, she would help out with at least the same amount for her son.
What a stroke of luck for Sarah (and her parents).
I estimate that every guest had to find more than £800 to go to this party. We didn’t go and the reason was nothing to do with the cost. I don’t suppose that Sarah noticed my absence or cared much, even if she did.
I had what seemed to be an insoluble dilemma. Should I to tell Sarah and her parents the real reason I wouldn’t go and upset them or, did I make up some wishy-washy excuse and so avoid bitterness and argument? I suppose that if I were a man with the courage of my convictions, I would have told them the truth and the truth would have been something like:
1. Thanks for the invitation but we won’t be coming.
2. It’s not a wedding reception that you’ve invited us to because the wedding is taking place six days earlier. This is nothing more than an extravagant party.
3. You and your future husband live within six miles of most of the invited guests. The only possible reason that this “Reception” is in Tuscany is to impress your friends but it doesn’t impress me.
4. You chose the location just for the photo opportunities.
5. ‘Extravagant’ and ‘Wasteful’ are nothing like strong enough words to describe the amount of money being spent on this display of vulgar, poor taste.
6. So, thanks once again for the invitation but I’m afraid I will have nothing to do with it.
Of course, as I am certainly not a man with the courage of my convictions, I didn’t say anything at all like that. I said,
“Sorry, but I have one of my very important biannual liver check-ups on that Friday.”
Would Solomon’s life experiences have been different if, spread over his short lifetime, his mother had somehow received just a fraction of the obscene amount of money that Sarah’s mother-in-law blew in just 12 hours. I suspect that things started to go wrong for Solomon the moment he was taken out of hospital.
Sarah has done absolutely nothing to deserve her comfortable life. Fate has been good to Sarah, while Solomon seemed to have never had any good fortune and almost certainly did nothing to deserve the wretched start to life that he seemed to have.
For obvious reasons, there’s no way that Alice and Solomon could have been mistakenly swapped at birth in 1976. If they had been, my guess is that today, Solomon would be an employed family man, while Alice would be a single mother with children, dependent upon state benefits. Both would probably still be alive.
Life isn’t fair.
