Worth waiting 44 years for...

One of those trivial urges led me to discover this list of wedding anniversary gifts, just to check some of the more obscure ones - yes, divorce papers could be construed an appropriate gift for the first anniversary - only to discover that there are also some modern alternative to the traditional, some of which are, frankly, bizarre. For instance, who decided that 'desk sets' were an appropriate 7th anniversary gift, musical instruments for the 24th or 'optical goods' for the 48th? There's an air of someone filling space with some of the entries like furniture for the 17th (which gets replaced 12 years later), bronze for the 19th, and alabaster for the 37th.

But it's in the 40s where the list starts to get slightly surreal, going from the traditional ruby at 40 to land at 41, 'improved real estate' (well, all that furniture has to fit somewhere, and it's good to put something on the land, I suppose) at 42, travel at 43 and then, obviously because the last 3 have cleaned out the savings, the 44th is the rather simple 'groceries'. There's a brief return to expense with sapphires at 45, then the following years are an 'original poetry tribute', books and the aforementioned telescopes and microscopes before the 49th gets the gift of the rather vague 'luxuries, any kind'.

The mention of the generic 'luxuries' does make me wonder whether part of the list was composed with the help of a cargo manifest from Elite but as yet there's no mention of a 'radioactives' or 'narcotics' anniversary, so maybe not.