Yesterday evening, before I turned my light off, I had been reading the book at reference 1, about a marriage between two older people, a widow and a widower, which had gone badly wrong.
Possibly as a result, I woke up thinking about getting married on or near the top of Mount Everest.
In the Church of England, the usual form used to be that a girl was given away by her father and married in her own church. The groom and the groom's man came, as it were, to fetch her; a relic of the formal exogamy which still rules in some parts of the world. A parson doubling as a registrar both conducted the ceremony and completed the register, completion of which required at least two signatures of competent people who had witnessed the ceremony, often the maid of honour and the groom's man.
These rules have now been relaxed a bit and it is possible to get married in all kinds of places other than churches. So this morning, I was wondering how this might work on Mount Everest.
Unlike say on Mount Snowdon, last noticed at reference 3, conducting the ceremony itself, needing as it does at least five people, anywhere near the summit, is not going to be practical.
And leaving aside the views that the locals might well have about this sort of thing.
The line that I came up with was that you would conduct the ceremony as near the summit as was practical, maybe Camp 1 at the top of the ice fall, itself a reasonably challenging hazard. You then needed some kind of photographic complement. Maybe one could take a picture of the ceremony, then someone could carry that picture to the summit and take a picture of it up there. The same day has a nice ring about it, but probably not practical given that the usual form is to start out for the summit from Camp 4 very early in the morning. Maybe one does it the other way round: take a picture of the summit, then carry that down to participate in the ceremony below? Maybe the newly married couple get themselves to the summit for a selfie? And moving away from photographs, maybe the wedding party could ice their drinks with ice brought down from the summit? All kinds of possibilities.
PS 1: the usual form of old was very patriarchal, very male dominated, with four of the five mandatory participants being men. Another relic of the past?
PS 2: in the margins, reading reference 5, I learn about a company called Crusoe (reference 6) and a workhorse of the giant datacentres now going up to drive AI called the A100 GPU (reference 7). It seems that GPU is a bit of a misnomer as it does rather more than graphics processing, even if that is where they started out. And mean time to failure becomes an issue when you have 100,000 of these units, any one of which could fail...
Failures which were a big deal when I started out with computing more than fifty years ago and computers were going wrong all the time. All sorts of elaborate wheezes to cope with them.
References
Reference 1: Le Chat - Georges Simenon - 1967. A late novel, with Simenon stopping writing fiction a few years later, after a long and prolific career.
Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/01/heritage-one.html. First notice of reference 1.
Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-sun.html.
Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/05/curious-sport.html. The last outing for Everest - or at least, Lohtse next door.
Reference 5: Oracle and OpenAI scrap deal to expand flagship Texas data centre: Meta in talks to take up additional computing capacity that the ChatGPT maker will not take up - Rafe Rosner-Uddin, George Hammond, Financial Times - 2026.
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