© Janek Skarzynski, AFP/FileA couple wearing presidential medals they received for having survived at least 50 years of marriage take part in a ceremony in their honour in Warsaw on February 5, 2014.
Grey-haired and grinning, two dozen couples hold champagne flutes at a Warsaw ceremony in their honour. They survived 50 years of marriage and in Poland, that is reason enough for a presidential medal.
"To qualify, you have to put in over 18,000 solid days of work. Other medals require less, so it really is a considerable feat to have spent the last half century together," Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz says at this month's event.
The lucky-in-loves take turns walking down the red carpet to accept their medals -- silver-plated with intertwined roses at the centre and a pink ribbon -- while family members cheer and play paparazzi at the back of the room at the so-called Wedding Palace.
The tradition is regularly played out in cities across the heavily Catholic country, with a hefty average of 65,000 medals awarded each year according to the president's office.
True, marital milestones are also recognised elsewhere. In the United States, a golden anniversary will get you a greeting from the White House, while Britain sets the bar a notch higher: couples have to make it through six decades without splitting for a message from the queen. She herself qualified seven years ago.
Yet no other country honours marathon marriages with a presidential medal, something more often associated with military feats for example.
"It's really quite unusual. I haven't found any other (medal) that's specifically for sustaining a marriage," says Megan Robertson, a 54-year-old computer programmer who runs the website "Medals of the World".
"Although, many countries have awards for raising large numbers of children -- something popular in Communist countries," adds the Briton who has herself been married for nearly 30 years.
Socialist-era Romania for example had "what they called the Order of Mother Hero, which I think she was, because you had to have 10 children to get it. That sounds pretty heroic to me."
Robertson says medals offer an indication of what a country finds important, whether it be a particular profession or trade or churning out enough children to fill factories and armies.
Comment: The poor guys are stuck in their vacuum of a false dichotomy: Anthropocentric CO2 emission based global warming versus denial that anything out of the ordinary is happening with local AND global weather. While the Met's Julia Slingo seems to have the sense to connect the local weather changes to the global situation, she is still speaking from the warming perspective. Astute observers will have noticed a slew of climate anomalies which negate their fairy tale bubble; such as the growing knowledge base that we are rapidly cooling and also witnessing a steep rise in global extreme weather, sinkhole, volcanic and meteor activity.
See: Extreme weather events and Earth Changes in March 2013