Living for Disco

I haven’t really been stressed about the wedding plans before now, but just in the last few days I’ve been finding myself having nocturnal nightmares about Gordon turning into a hideous ex boyfriend of mine, or only having work shoes to wear, and waking nightmares about forgetting some crucial thing which will result everyone having a miserable time, or cost us an extra x-thousand pounds.

This morning I’m feeling particularly tense and tearful, so I decided to google wedding stress. I don’t know why. No other wedding advice I’ve solicited from the internet has been remotely useful. It’s all about fascinators and wedding favours. What is it with wedding favours? Surely the idea is for people to give YOU presents? And I’m buggered if I’m paying 25 quid a head for a small box full of sugared almonds.

Anyway, the advice about wedding stress is pretty much the same. It falls into two categories:
1. Advice for brides with pushy parents (Say NO! Learn BOUNDARIES! You don’t HAVE to marry at Papa’s golf club – glory be!)
2. Advice for brides whose future spouses are not supportive of the planning.

Neither of these affects me. My mother, I suspect, is quite enjoying the fact that she doesn’t have to plan anything, as Gordon and I are fairly sure of what we want. She merely absorbs the updates with interest (and the occasional expression of alarm if it sounds expensive), and tries to work out what she’s going to wear.

Gordon’s mother is even less involved. We’re not even sure at the moment if she’s even coming. She didn’t react well to the fact that we put ‘karaoke’ on the invitation, and seems to think that we will be married in the company of a bunch of drunken lager louts in the middle of a rain-soaked, shit-spattered field, while cows chew desultorily at the hem of the guests’ best dresses.

So, not the traditional family stress for me. As for Gordon, he is as invested in the planning as I am, thank the lord.

No, I need to work out how to cope with monosyllabic photographers, venue proprietors who fail to make any helpful suggestions for buffet menus, cake bakers who seem incapable of baking reasonably sized cup cakes with paper cases that stay on, and a bill that is rising out of the murky depths of our debt like a cash-gobbling kraken.

It doesn’t help that I’m on a detox diet this week. As far as I can work out, we are allowed to eat rice cakes and drink water. Actually, it’s not that bad, but I’m hoping to lose a bit of weight. I have put on a stone since I tried the dress on, and I don’t want the evil bride-shop witch to have any excuse whatsoever to make further belittling comments when I go for the fitting.

Still, I hate dieting. I’ve never had to do it before. Usually by 9am I’m craving chocolate croissants with butter on, and a slice of toast. I can’t drink caffeine or alcohol (horrors!), eat wheat, oats, dairy, or anything that’s been cooked for more than 5 minutes. Apparently, according to the wedding stress advice, healthy eating really can help. To be honest, it’s making me tired, flatulent and inclined to shove dates attractively into my mouth every time I feel a blood-sugar dip coming on, which is every ten minutes.

It’s torture. TORTURE.

Roll on Friday. On Friday, I can roll out my traditional stress busting method – a big, fuck off glass of white wine, and good company.

It can’t come too soon.

Hello! I’m back from my holiday, during which I did not have much opportunity to blog the many marvellous things that happened to me, which included being pecked by lorikeets, seeing possums and wallabies, drinking dirty martinis under the ocean-side palms and watching my little sister get married on a beach. There will be holiday updates soon, and oh my, will they be a hoot. I hope.

In the meantime, the first thing that we had to do when we got back was to visit the registrar to state our intent to marry each other. I had no idea you had to do this kind of thing - get permission from the council to get married? What the fuck have the council got to do with it? Aren’t they responsible for refuse collection and digging up the roads in an inconvenient fashion?

Of course, I realise that there has to be a record of births, deaths and marriages, and that this has to be done by the parish. However, I’d not given much thought to the fact that you have to go and hand over a cheque for £60 and answer questions about your intended in order to prove that you haven’t imported them from a developing nation for tax breaks.

I actually started to get a bit worried when Gordon, having been asked the relatively straightforward question of his age at the current time, had some trouble answering. Would the registrar think that he had failed to memorise his cover properly? I hoped he didn’t sound too Lithuanian.

‘You’re 41′, I hissed, hoping to support him (in a future-wifely fashion) through this mental meltdown.

‘Don’t help him! You’re not allowed to help him!’ said the registrar.

The same thing happened when it came to the answering of questions about his bride, amongst which were details of my age, occupation and length of time lived in Bournemouth. There is only so much information you can convey with your eyebrows, and ‘34′, ‘Trust Fundraising Manager’ and ‘7 months’ tends to be a little specific. We did get there in the end, although I think my gurning may have alarmed the registrar.

So, we have no officially declared our intention to get hitched, and with any luck, no lunatics (you know who you are) will write in to the council objecting on entirely spurious grounds in the next 15 days.

It feels like I’m practically married already.

G and I are getting married in less than six months. We’ve already told everyone the date, numerous times, and asked them to keep it aside, but now we wish to send out the invitations. They’re all done, and look marvellous and spiffy, thanks to my friend Maurice, who sorted the design and printing for us and made us very happy.

What is not making us happy, however, is the Royal Mail. We thought that it might be nice to order fancy stamps to go on the envelopes, just to make them look pretty - not that anyone is going to notice the stamps, but it’s the little touches, no? So, just over two weeks ago, we ordered a large number of bird and insect (birds and bees - geddit?) stamps from the Royal Mail website.

Now, I may be naive (charmingly, so I’m sure), but shouldn’t the Royal Mail at least be able to deliver their own product in a swift and efficient fashion? I don’t really understand the delay. If Amazon can get an iPod sent to me within 3 working days, then why can’t the Royal Mail simply whip a few stamps off the warehouse shelf, shove them in an envelope, and, oh, I don’t know, post them?

The only thing I can think of is that they are so dedicated to providing us with special stamps that they have commissioned a photographer to go out and photograph 80 different birds and insects, and they are glueing those photographs onto pre-gummed, stamp shaped bits of paper as we speak.

I have been forced to come to the conclusion that the Royal Mail are rubbish - that someone else is responsible for successfully delivering all the mail, and selflessly are letting the Royal Mail take credit.

Whoever you are, please, please can you deliver my stamps? Or all my friends are going to forget and no-one will be at my wedding except for the bridesmaids, and possibly the best man, and the groom, if they haven’t been peppered with shot, run over by a go-kart, or suffocated by a lap dancer at the stag do.

I am unwell. My limbs feel terribly heavy, my head is pounding and I just can’t face the thought of doing, eating, drinking, watching, or reading anything. So I’ve been sitting on the sofa, my bleary eyes fixed on the bird feeding station, willing it to begin sporting avian life, all in vain.

Apart from being very dull, it’s also dis-spiriting. From my little patio in Windhoek, I could see all manner of brightly coloured birds at close range, as they stole strands of wool from my mop, or dropped little gifts on the tiles for Boris to sniff at. I know that Bournemouth is not Windhoek, but even so, I’m supposed to be able to attract some birds to my little garden. Even a blue-tit would be nice. I simply don’t understand what I’m doing wrong.

I don’t suppose it helps that it’s lashing down outside. The rain is so vicious I expect any birds venturing out would find themselves shredding in half a minute, and if I were them, I’d be hiding somewhere warm too.

This lack of birds is becoming somewhat of an obsession with me. I started off so excited at the thought of a garden full of twittering, feathery little bodies, and now the only reason I leave food out is out of some kind of misplaced stubbornness - an unwillingness to admit defeat, and the fact that the birds simply do not like our garden.

Any advice?

It’s freezing cold, and drizzling as only Welsh clouds can drizzle. A baleful goose stands damply in a puddle outside the door. I assume the door is there to keep the cold out, but it is woefully bad at its job. We decide to get a cup of tea to see if we can warm our frozen blood up.

Everything is fine until Gordon asks if they do Mocha. I resisted the urge to laugh. I mean, I grew up in a part of the world where uttering the word ‘cappuccino’ in public would earn you a clip round the ear and banishment to the bathroom to wash your mouth out with laver bread. The girl, who is wearing a tabard, looks confused. She says “We have filter coffee?” hopefully, as if this will stop any more difficult questions flittering over the counter, and messing with the status quo.

“Well,” says Gordon, unaware of the mental havoc he is causing. “Do you think you could mix some filter coffee with some hot chocolate for me?”.

There is a brief silence. The most extraordinary expression of disgust and horror pulls its way across her face. Her lip curls incredulously. Her eyebrows move steadily up her forehead until they are lost beneath her bangs. “Um,” she says, clearly terrified beyond her wits. ” We don’t have a machine for that.”

Fortunately, we find a spoon, and mix the coffee and chocolate together ourselves, once she is out of sight. When we leave, the goose is still pecking around in the puddle.

We decide we don’t really want to get married in this particular venue, and drive off into the rain.