Weddings are rum old events. People seem to make them in to a big ‘thing’ when really it’s just people you like (and relatives) in a room getting drunk.

The planning for our bash appears to be going well. There have been no fights and the ‘wedding police’ haven’t been called out once.

Here are a list of things we’re not fretting about:

• The flowers, can anyone remember the flowers from a wedding ever?
• Seating arrangements, put people next to people you think they’d like.
• Readings, find something we like, get someone we like to read it.
• Wedding speeches, keep them short, put in jokes, no being nasty.
• Food, people are mostly there to get drunk.
• Booze, Our friends aren’t demanding ‘In a glass’ is about as fussy as they get.

This means when people ask, ‘How is the wedding planning going?’ I don’t have a good answer, which sounds like I don’t care. 

However there are some things I am fretting about/have fretted about:

• Are my suit trousers too tight? Or too loose?
• When I first tried my suit trousers on did I take to long so the tailor (who was out of the room) think I was up to something naughty?
• What is the correct thing to say to the tailor when you’ve finished putting on your trousers?
• If the tailor isn’t responding to your calls, is it okay to shout?
• If you are mid-shout when they quietly enter the room from a door you didn’t see is it best to apologise? Or style it out and pretend you are a bit deaf suddenly?
• If you went with the deaf option, should you shout for the rest of the fitting to stay in character?
• Also if you bump into a friend in the street, right out side the shop, should you stay shouty to not spoil the ‘story’ you’re maintaining.
• Even if it’s quite a long chat and someone else turns up?

On an unrelated note I’m a bit scared to go back to the tailors for my final fitting. I wonder if I can get someone else to pick up the suit for me, after all I have lost my voice after all that shouting.

Welcome To Stoke

Biscuit

Today is the official 2 year anniversary of when I asked Jen to be my girlfriend (and she said yes).

To celebrate this we booked a day off work to take advantage of the bank holiday weekend and have 4 days away on a sunny foreign beach for a relaxing holiday.

We missed out  celebrating properly last year as Jen’s school friends booked a group weekend away on the only date they could all do so we were determined to make it special this year.

Unfortunately Jen’s Grandpa died rather unexpectedly a week ago. He was a lovely man who she was very close to and it was all a rather horrible surprise. The funeral was on Friday near Manchester so we originally adjusted the plans to fly on Saturday, in an attempt to salvage some of our weekend away, before discovering that there was a big family meal planned on the Sunday, today.

The plans were officially broken. So, instead of the Seychelles, this evening we are staying in a Brittania Hotel in Stoke-on-Trent.

We’re in Stoke-on-Trent as a necessary evil because tomorrow we’re spending the day at Alton Towers for super fun times and it’s only a short drive in the morning. The downside of this, however, is that we’re in Stoke-on-Trent.

On the plus side, if you want to buy a sad looking wedding dress, eat a curry or stare listlessly into the canal contemplating why you’re in Stoke-on-Trent then your desires will be well catered for.

By way of a celebration of our 2 years of glorious relationship we visited Stoke-on-Trent’s second best restaurant. The best restaurant is closed on Sundays. Armed with a carrier bag of Tiger beers, we took our seat in the Indian restaurant, officially doubling the number of diners.

After 5 minutes, 2 families came in and were sat on either side of us, ignoring the 20 other empty tables, and both then got their food first because our waiter had forgotten to take out order to the chef. The small child to my left was playing on his Nintendo 3DS whilst his mum talked about how the “Chechnyan” bombers were brainwashed to be soldiers of God and his dad shot me suspicious glances.

The true delight of this restaurant, however, is the combination of ’80s power ballads drifting around the half empty room accompanied by the silent visuals of Bollywood music videos on the 40″ TV.  Jennifer Rush’s “The Power of Love”, Celine Dion’s “Think Twice” and George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” all followed each other as a succession of Indian women and men coyly danced behind fluted pillars, teased suitors and hung off the back off tuk-tuks, hair flowing in the desert wind and somehow all in time to the music.

The whole thing was so hilariously miserable that we almost choked on our bottles of Tiger with laughter. I asked Jen if this was where she’d imagine being on our second anniversary.

Finally, Annie Lennox’s “No More I Love Yous” finished off our will to live so we left our half eaten currys and sloped back to the Britannia.

Perhaps we should have been having a romantic break away, basking on a white sandy beach, but I’ve just given Jen my last Rolo and we’re going to be to watch Breaking Bad. It may not be what we chose for this weekend but what’s most important is that I’m spending tomorrow with the woman I love eating as many giant hot dogs and ice cream as possible then getting violently spun upside down and possibly vomiting bright orange sugary drinks.

And on that note… play ‘em out Sexy Sax Man!

Yesterday morning I woke up to a slightly grumpy Jen. Since we’d gone to bed in a great mood and I’d slept well I couldn’t imagine what might be up.

Far from a relaxing night sleep, it turns out that she’d had something of an emotional and sexual ordeal. After nearly asphyxiating from laughter I insisted that she write down the full account, for science, obviously. Here it is, in her own words:

• I had epic troubles sleeping last night. I very rarely have trouble sleeping, usually it’s me happily snoring away whilst you have a long hard think about your life and your own boiling resentment at my happy snoozings.
• Snuggling up I felt a massive rush of love, and also how grumpy I was about you being all warm and asleep.
• Then I thought about what it would be like if I didn’t have you. How my life might be if you weren’t in it, how empty and lonely I would be compared to how I feel now.
• And I started to think what it would be like if you DIED.
• I indulged this as sometimes having a good cry is cathartic and helps me go to sleep easily. I’m fully aware this *may* mean I am mad.
• I then thought about ways you might die – and how upsetting it would be, the MOST upsetting was if you got stuck in some sort of rotary machinery doing some of your outdoor work, and how if they moved the bit of the machine (this was some sort of combine harvester in my imaginings) you would insta-die and what I would say to you if I had the ability to be there at your final moments. With hindsight, I am watching WAY too much ‘Grey’s Anatomy’.
• I got very upset thinking about your funeral, working myself up into such a state that I imagined what I might say to the, doubtless, many hundreds of people in attendance.
• I then promised you, in your sleep, that I would always remember to feed the birds.
• This was the final emotional straw and I burst into waves of racking sobs eventually calming down to the point where I started to drift off.
• It was lovely, I was warm, dozy, blissfully hollowed out by upsetting myself so much. It was a matter of seconds before I was into the cradling arms of oblivion.
• THEN you shifted in your sleep, muttering something very rude about cocks in general, your cock, and where you were going to put it.
• You grabbed my back bottom, making me jump about 14 foot of the bed in the process and started to, one can only describe it as ‘rut’ your entire hand INTO the crevice.
• You did this for about a minute with me alternating between amused, annoyed and then, like the proverbial abuse victim, resigned.
• You left your hand there after turning away.
• I lay, once again, wide eyed and confused. My back bottom felt the same way.

So apparently I am a closet sex criminal and Jen is lulled to sleep by thoughts of the tragedy of my death. Mental. Mental but bloody brilliant.

Marriage percentage: 93%

Does anyone else do this?

There are lots of things I really love about living with Jen:

• She brings home surprise booze and chocolate on a Friday night.
• She humours my increasingly obsessive behaviour with feeding and housing the birds in the garden (and hushed exclamations of “LOOK!!!” every couple of minutes when a tit lands on the window feeder).
• Lazy weekend lie-ins ’til mid-day.
• Doing decorating together (basically giant Lego).
• She organised a surprise Rock Band birthday party for me in the garden under a gazebo, like playing to a really tiny festival and plastic instruments.
• Having my Partner in Crime on hand every day for adventures, My Little Pony and serious high-fives.

However, as the tides ebb and flow and the moon waxes and wanes, so there is also a darker side to living with my girlfriend.

This particular darker side is that she is convinced our house is trying to kill her. Girls are mad.

This manifests itself in a number of ways. Initially it was the belief that the house is maliciously costing her money; the electric shower breaking; the leaking boiler; the doorframe falling apart, the mouse in the kitchen.

It then progressed to an insistence that the house is actively trying to kill her off;

• Trying to freeze her during the snowy weather by euthanising the heating
• Poisoning her by setting the drill battery on fire whilst charging.
• Tripping her up on the gate so she skinned her shin AND cut her face.
• Crushing her toes by moving the landing ladder in the night and making her fall over it.
• Gouging a chunk out of her leg with the stationary Workmate that is propped up against the wall.

The last of these happened earlier today and the first I knew was a banshee cry of “I FUCKING HATE THIS , FUCKING HOUSE!” and a teary Jen looking at a bloody hole in her jeans. To be fair it was a nasty gouge and I would be pretty upset too. Once Dr. Biscuit had cleaned and plastered the wound we had to have a little chat about how the house isn’t really trying to make her life hell, it’s just an unfortunate series of unrelated events.

Once she had calmed down we decided to make banana bread.

10 minutes later the garden hose exploded in her hands, all over the kitchen.

Wedding suits are a thing, as in a thing that people think about. Okay fret about. People fret about them because they are important clothes.

I asked chums for advice on where to get suits and picked out a place from a list they recommended. It was a cool looking place that had just started doing suits, they looked beautiful on their website and the shop had a nice name.

Suits you sir

It was my first experience of a suit fitting and I was impressed before I walked in the shop. For a start the suit place had a sword in the window, an actual sword. Just hanging out and being awesome.

There were also a few guns to play with (decommissioned guns, but guns all the same) and for posing with. The walls were lined with pictures of cool vintage dudes with moustaches doing vintage things like standing by horses. It was sort of like the house I shared with Biscuit but more grown-up and on a bigger budget (their swords weren’t plastic).

The men in the shop were terribly nice and we spent a lot of time talking about jackets, cloth and My Fair Lady. Then we discussed pockets and looked at little patches of cloth in funny books. I got really excited by some brightly coloured materials until they politely pointed out that they were linings and not for making suits out of. Drat.

After a bit of chat we went downstairs and I was measured for the suit. It was very discreet, the man left the room any time I had to put on the test trousers and the bit where they could touch your junk didn’t really happen. I mean there was some measuring there but it was over so fast and it didn’t get invasive.

Once they had all the numbers I got back into my boring clothes and we arranged another visit on Wednesday so the Theatre Producer could give her feedback on colours and stuff. I texted her for suggestions about if there was an official colour, she said, ‘pirates.’

It was only after I’d left that I realised there had been no mention of cost. Not even a hint. This is never a good sign. I checked the website. Still no prices. That was even worse.

The best things in life are free, apart from suits

It took a few Google searches before I found out the price range of the suits. They are pricey, not just expensive, but the sort of cost where reading it makes your knees go a bit wobbly. Even if I sold all the kidneys I have I still wouldn’t be able to cover the costs.

I can’t afford it. So now I have to think of an excuse as to why I can’t get a suit from those lovely chaps. I’ve only just met them but I don’t want to disappoint them because they are so cool. Here the best ones I have so far:

•  The Theatre Producer has been lost at sea, so the wedding is off. I simply I won’t need the suit any more, but this may lead them to suggest a funeral suit.
• We’re having a naturist wedding. A nude one, not one with loads of trees.
• I was so inspired by their work I’ve decided to take up tailoring and make my own suit.
• My great-aunt has insisted that I use the family tailor, so I must. This only works as long as I leave before they can ask any questions.
• I have amnesia.

Other suggestions are welcome.

The talk last night went very well, and not just because we had bongos. There was a stellar line-up including brilliant original stuff from MyLoveLifeInYourHands, Joel Golby, Nell Frizzell and Craig Taylor. There was a lot of laughter and quite  bit of pity, especially the latter for the stuff Biscuit and I performed.

If you missed the show you can catch up on what we performed here:

• Biscuit told this excellent story involving dwarf porn, lego and accidental winky texts
• I stuttered through the tragic story of a lovely lady I met at a film party,  how I messed things up, and then made them even worse.

Bongo fever

The bongos worked pretty well, although our bongoist Phil (who is a professional drummer that we met in the bar) got a bit distracted and didn’t quite bong as much as we would have liked. Still the rareness of the bongs made them all the more precious.

I also learned that when you own a set of bongos you can guarantee that you are the worst person on any form of public transport, FACT.

Someone having a loud conversation on a phone?  BONGO Not any more. Smelling the carriage up with stinky food? BONGO They’ll get off an the next stop. I even had some scary looking dude cross the road to avoid me as I bongo my way home from the bus. RESULT.

I’ve had to hide the bongos from myself so I don’t get drunk on bongo power, it’s a constant danger.

So here’s a thing. We’re doing another blog reading. This one won’t be a fierce competition and hopefully Biscuit won’t decide to read a long story about periods, but we will be live, reading some stuff and you can come and laugh at our faces. In fact we’d like it if you did.

More importantly it’s being organised by the excellent Kit Lovelace of MyLoveLifeInYourHands fame (remember the dude we went to New York with) and will feature a load of other also excellent people reading funny things about relationships.

Not sold yet?

This will also be a rare chance to see proof that Biscuit isn’t dead and if you felt the need to heckle him about not writing more posts, well I wouldn’t have a problem with that*

If that’s not enough to tempt you there will be bongo action, a selection of hats and at least a couple of jokes that were considered too rude for Radio 4.**

If you say you like the blog we may even buy you a drink.

*Please do this after the show, heckling during a performance is an awful habit.

**True.

I’ve just had an amazing idea for a dot-com. It’s so good I’m going to put it on this secret blog in the hopes that a bored multi-millionaire spots it and emails me to buy the idea. That happens right?

Here is the problem: You never know what someone is like before you date them.

Solution: A website where people are reviewed by ex-girlfriends and boyfriends so you can find out what they are like before you agree to meet them for coffee. Sort of like Trip Advisor but with people.

Meet Datr

Just think about it, knowing the sort of reviews someone had got from previous dates would allow you to skip a whole category of berks. It would be like trying to find the perfect hotel, but with people ‘I’m looking for someone who has at least three stars on empathy with access to a pool’ or, ‘Good value for money, better than I expected and very clean.’

It would be brilliant, or at least better than Klout (which is officially the worst thing ever but people still talk about it).

The only real problem I can see with it is that by asking previous dates to rate them you’d probably get a lot of negative scores. (NEVER CALLED ME BACK -5 points). Oh well that’s a thing for someone else to solve, I’m just an ideas guy.

I’m not dead or anything, it’s just there isn’t a lot of wedding news at the moment. We went to the local council offices to get our licences. Apparently you have to give the locals at least two weeks to object to you getting married before you can do it.

As part of this form you have to answer questions about each other and list the jobs of your dads. I found this quite exciting as I got to define my dad as ‘inventor’ after my sister rather boringly put ‘farmer’ on her marriage form thing. He was totes more of an inventor than a farmer.

Anyway we have the forms and they have been sent off to the place where we are getting married so they know we are allowed to do it. Phew.

Our ceremony is not going to be in a church and since we’ve gone down that route we’ve found out we aren’t allowed any religion in the vows or the readings. Not even a bit.

This means my ideal vow (By Grabthars Hammer) is out of the window, but on the plus side we aren’t allowed to play Angels by Robbie Williams.

We weren’t going to play it anyway but it’s nice to know it’s actually forbidden. If we can just get the rest of the UK to adopt this policy the country will be a better place.

I wasn’t good at dating, or meeting suitable girls, and now it turns out I’m not very good at wedding planning either. Oh well at least I am quite good at carrying heavy things and eating chips.

Previously I had thought I was super easy going and didn’t care about anything about you, know, winning the bet. *ahem* I mean marrying my darling fiancée, but it turns out I’m quite picky.

We’ve looked at a lot of wedding venues now. Whole weekends have been spent stomping around country homes, museums and even slightly rubbish castles while a salesperson talks to you about seat cover options or maximum capacity numbers. That bit isn’t fun, but it’s over now because we’ve got a venue booked in and a date.

Here is what I have learned

• It is expensive, I’ve had to force myself to not think of the wedding in terms of motorcycles we could have bought because it breaks my heart.
• Things I don’t want: A bland function room, feeling like I’m in someone else’s house, a tiny dance floor.
• Things TP doesn’t want: A tent, seat covers, me to dress as a spider.
• There is a fun bit later on where you have an evening of ‘testing food’ for the ceremony. I can’t wait for that.
• Putting a deposit down on a venue makes this feel even more real than buying a ring. It’s really happening.
• Some people book their weddings three years in advance. THREE YEARS! We could be ruled by robots by then.
• Or sharks.
• You can hire ice-cream bikes, jugglers and even choirs but even if you’re thinking of using a military museum for your wedding they won’t let you play on the tanks or hold a musket.
• Don’t even bother asking about having an axe fight on the day.
• It’s very hard to resist doing a stupid theme, not that stupid themes are out it’s just there about three dozen we want to try.
• Choosing who to invite is hard, especially with couples because that instantly doubles the number.
• Also while working on the list you get strange urges to invite people just because they gave you extra chips or let your cross at the traffic lights. At the current rate we are likely to have a table just of people who have served me nice coffee.
• Deciding that you’re not going to invite members of your extended family because they are awful is lovely. I can’t recommend it enough.
• All brides have spreadsheets of information on venues and they trade them.
• Apparently the system is you get a rough list together, then venue hunt and then choose a date. Then you do nothing for a while until it gets closer to the time.
• We’re sort of at that bit now.