My 70th birthday present

I'm seventy on 6th July, and want something to permanently mark the occasion with. Something very personal. Something that I'll have with me henceforth, that won't wear out. The usual things bought as birthday presents won't do. 

I've decided on a ring. I will wear it all the time - well, not when doing anything mucky, or when taking a shower! - but I'll have it on my finger all day, and it will be worth displaying. It mustn't cost too much, of course. But I've got a budget of £1,000 in mind. My local girlfriends, as is our custom when one of us has a birthday, are putting up part of the cost - £100+ between them - and I have the £895 I got from selling my Leica X-U camera recently. So my ring money is in place. It's just a question of discussing the precise design, the metal to be used, and the stone to select, with Rebecca at Pruden & Smith in Ditchling, where I have an account. That discussion will take place early next week. Then Rebecca will get on with making the ring for me.

The design is a no-brainer. Two years ago I was going to have, as a birthday present, this silver ring with a Cubic Zirconia stone:

That one wasn't going to cost anything like £1,000! The silver and the CZ stone made it much less expensive, though still a nice present. I was very drawn to the modern and very simple design, with a setting that displayed most of the stone, not just the top of it. My girl friends loved it. But in the end I got Rebecca to shorten my pearl necklace, and use the four pearls now released to make a pendant with, and I had that for my 68th birthday instead. 

But I didn't forget that ring. Now I'm going to have a version of it for my 70th birthday, but not in silver. I'm looking at white gold - 9 carat, maybe 18 carat - and a different stone, probably a light blue topaz.  Indeed a light blue sapphire would be nice! But with gold and jewellery prices as they are nowadays, I will have to be careful not to blow my budget. The important things are that the ring looks fabulous, whatever the materials, and that it's durable. So a metal that suits the design, and a stone that is sufficiently hard. I found a picture on the Internet of another ring being offered online, which gives an approximate indication of what mine might look like when finished:

The stone could be just as appealing to me in a shade of green-blue, but I still want to keep the colour lighter rather than darker. I'm not choosing the stone colour according to my 'birth month' or on some astrological basis. I might come to regard this ring as an essential companion, ensuring good luck - a status that one or two other possessions have - but I'm not going to be bound by conventional wisdom on this kind of thing. 

I'm conscious that my friends are paying only a small fraction of the cost of this ring, so to make them feel they truly have a significant stake in its making, I have consulted them extensively on how the ring should look. 

One thing in particular: on which finger should I wear it? I think it would look very nice on the ring finger of my left hand. And there are practical considerations that point to that finger. I want the ring to be safe from accidental knocks, so it needs to be away from the edge of my hand. I think it would look and feel odd on my middle or index fingers; and these are anyway - along with the thumb - the fingers most used for manual tasks, and therefore to place a ring on one or other would run an increased risk of its getting messed up or damaged in some way. The ring finger is the safest.  

And yet this is the finger that is traditionally - at least in this country, and in this society - reserved for wedding and engagement rings. Asking around, I get the impression that there is no hard-and-fast rule that insists a woman must leave her ring finger bare if unmarried, widowed or divorced. It's available for other purposes, and she can do as she pleases. Well, I know what my Mum would have said about such freedom. But I am of a younger generation, and I'm not one to pander to tradition if it doesn't suit me. And it's such a waste of finger-space, if the ring finger is left unused! So I'm going to wear this 70th Birthday Ring on my ring finger. It will - as I put it to my girl friends in one of my emails - be analogous to an eternity ring, marking an important stage in my life, and looking forward to the best years yet to come. That's the idea, anyway.

In any case, I do feel entitled to use my ring finger. I was, after all, married in the dim and distant past. It won't matter if it might suggest that I'm still a married woman, because (a) it's some protection from unwanted older-male attention; (b) I think many married women will feel more comfortable if they see a sign that I'm hitched, and no threat; (c) in any event, the reality of the situation is that I am independent and intend to remain so, and wish to do nothing that could encourage anything more than ordinary friendships. There is of course a possible drawback: I might be asked about my husband, which I don't want to talk about. But then, I can explain that it's actually my 70th Birthday Ring - an important piece of jewellery - and as deserving of a place on my ring finger as any bride's trinket. Really, it's hard to argue otherwise.