It's Marriage Authority Day !

Luton registry office really starts your exciting road to marriage with all the pomp & ceremony that you would expect from multi-cultural Luton. From the outside it looks like an undertakers and on the inside a sprawling dental surgery.

Walking into the reception we are greeted by the 'little britain-esque' receptionist, "wiv you in a minute" as she returns to her phone conversation, "When was baby born?....uh huh...and the fathers name is ?...ok I understand, it only needs one of you to come in to register little Tyrone....ok Miss Shah, see you on Thursday".

I think I can apply for job seekers allowance in this place, they seem to do everything else, as I peruse a leaflet on civil marriage, which Pippa points out is actually civil partnerships which is for gay & lesbo marriages, so I quickly return the pink leaflet.

I'll Be Home By 11pm.....Honest !

Having been away from home for a week, it may not have been one of my wisest decisions to go out with my mates within 7 hours of returning home. However I did reassure Pip that I wouldn't be out long and that i would drink sensibly and responsibly. Pippa was even kind enough to drop me at the train station so I wouldn't be late to meet the guys on the 6:29pm train to St.Albans.

On the train, Graham enthralls us with tales of his kidney stones and the unrivalled pain of passing one whilst having a pee. The icing on his story though was that he was now booked to have his bladder checked using a non-invasive procedure, a medical breakthrough - a camera up his knob. Having known graham for over 30 years, I have come to learn his body language, I could tell he wasn't looking forward to cock-cam next Tuesday.

Lucky Dip My Arse !

I check the ticket against the numbers on Ceefax - naff all ! - I go upstairs to check them again on the PC, just in case I wrote a number down wrong or Ceefax had an error - still naff.

If the National Lottery launch a new game where you have to get two numbers or less across five lucky dips, then we would be quids in every bleedin week. It doesn't have to be a tripple roll-over of £15million, somewhere between one and two mill would be absolutely fine. I wouldn't give up work totally, I'm sure I'd care a bit less and rarely work late, but I'd still keep turning up.

Even using a Lottery system doesn't seem to deliver much more fruit. My computer program which analysed the previous years results, threw me up 2 lines of numbers that are most likely to yield the highest return over the next year. Back in 2004, this computer program of mine ran all weekend to crunch the data and come up with the right numbers. Not because it was a highly complex system analysing millions of numbers, I just forgot to put a stop statement at the end of it so it kept of generating the same numbers again and again !

Well this system has cost me hundreds in tickets and paid back about £30. Someone please tell me when the 'lucky' bit of Lucky Dip will kick in for me please ? For all the good my numbers are doing me, I may as well click the button below to generate next weeks winning numbers.

Result

Hey - We're Going to IKEA !!!

With Ikea's latest store now open in Bletchley, no longer do we have to go all the way to either London or Birmingham to wait ages to park, follow arrows on the floor around a large warehouse, purchase £70 worth of tat then have a hot-dog. Now we can just pop up the road.

Having just got back from flat-packed Swedish hell, I can safely say that Ikea have taken the experience to a totally new level. You actually start queuing nearly 2 miles away from the store in stop-start traffic before you can get in the car park.

With Radio 2, Pippa and a braeburn apple to while away the time, the 35 minute wait to enter the car park was not as arduous as it might have been. If the queue to reach the car park is this bad, I thought, then just think what parking and shopping are going to be like, it was going to be bedlam. I’m a firm believer in the fact that if you decide to go to the likes of an Ikea, or certain shops on certain occasions (like Christmas eve) then you know in advance what it’s going to be like. The lack of parking, the irate stream of cars waiting for a solitary space, the Wembley sized crowds, screaming children, fear of pickpockets and do-gooding charity tin-shakers, it’s enough to drive you insane, unless you prepare. Mental preparation for events such as Ikea is essential. Never go to Ikea just after a row, otherwise your other-half may nip off in the bedding department and you wont see her again until candles and mirrors and you’ll get the blame for walking off. Neither should you go on a full stomach, for two good reasons, toilets are rare and thus hard to find and believe me you don’t want to have to pee in a Rävïllï watering can in the garden department if you get caught short and secondly, you just have to leave room for a 50p hotdog. The secret is to get into an Ikea mindset, which is a trance-like state where you just blank out everybody else and push your trolley in a smooth flowing motion whilst following the arrows.

Whilst passing beanbags on my way to bed throws, I could hear other customers around me complaining about a young couple walking towards us, against the flow of the arrows, anyone would have thought that they were naked and smoking a joint. The snidey looks and mumbled comments as they passed the ‘arrow followers’ was amazing. I however, just kept on pushing and kept on not caring about anyone else.

Arriving at blinds, just before wicker baskets, Pippa pointed out the new Ikea ‘vertical window panel blinds system’ which she had seen earlier in the brochure. As far as I could see, the only new thing about this ‘system’ was two fold, (1) the blinds were twice as wide as the ones they sold last year, and (2) Ikea couldn’t be arsed to put all the pieces together in a kit to make it easy for you. To purchase this ‘system’ you would have to perform a Krypton Factor style, mental agility test to see if you could construct this ‘modular blind system’ in your mind then find the right bits on the shelves and put them in your trolley before either the line was discontinued or you start to suffer dehydration, whichever came first. I thought I had it all straight in my mind, 3-way track, suspended wall brackets, pull-rod, extra clips – now did I need a special mitre saw block for cutting the track, no, I’d do what I normally did and suspend between the freezer and my toolbox, hold it with one hand and try to cut it with the other, then swear every 10 seconds when the blade slipped.

The one thing we were missing was the 2 beige blinds that would make up the colour contrast nicely, the beige shelf was empty. An orphaned trolley was parked next to the one point four metre single track rails and no one had been near it for nearly five minutes. On my second time of passing it, my suspicions were confirmed, four packs of beige blinds were in the trolley, just the job, but at that precise moment a short Malaysian couple appeared from another isle grasping a toilet brush and twelve sherry glasses. They added these to their booty in the, until now, abandoned trolley. I could tell that this couple had a blatant disregard for trolley ownership and that it wasn’t a momentary lapse of madness that made them wander yards away from it, lured by the sparkle of the parrot-encrusted bathroom mirror, they were serial trolley-abusers and they would leave it again, but this time they would pay, the hefty price of beige blinds.

After studying their trolley from a distance, I worked out which angle to extract the French loaf sized blinds from the topless cage, my years of playing Jenga in the pub were about to pay off. I prepared to make another circuit and approach the trolley from the handle side, hence using my body to block my actions from most of the store. I was set, I had a plan, an escape route, an alibi (I thought the trolley was new stock) and transport.

“Both of us blind as bats !” Pippa informed me as she stands up in front of my trolley, “Look, they were here right underneath all the time” she grins thrusting two beige blinds into my trolley with glee. Now that we had all the component parts, I would have no excuse for not completing the installation as soon as we got home. In fact, I would probably have to come up with a pretty good reason for not doing at least the prep work and measuring in the car whilst driving back to Luton.

Pippa’s slightly raised voice of excitement had alerted the Malaysians in my direction, I had began to worry that they were on to me, and like a couple of ASBO-ridden parents only starting to show concern about their kids four minutes before they are taken into care, the Polynesians had their little Hawaii-five-O hands gripped around their trolley handle and were reversing at a fair rate of knots. Pippa’s well trained shopping sense and eagle eyes had saved me from breaking the eleventh commandment ‘Thou shall not dip into another mans basket’ Nigel 7:11.

The highlight of the journey home was to purchase twenty-three of Sainsbury’s finest ‘Be Good To Yourself’ ready meals, yeah there were no real highlights. This stock of prepared food were the backbone of my healthy eating regime, which I need to follow rigorously if I was to have any chance of loosing my target 2lb a week between now and the wedding.

The blinds didn’t get installed, instead we had a bottle of wine and watched the telly, like normal people.

Is a Provisional Booking Legally Binding ?

A new 'groundhog day' wedding adventure starts to unfold before me, I know where I'm going today (the same place as yesterday) and I feel it in my water that I will be booking a wedding date before the Eastenders omnibus starts. Even so, I raise myself out of bed and head downstairs.

Fruit & fibre cereal may well be good for me, but its bloody hard going eating it first thing in the morning. The bottom third of a bowl makes me feel like one of the Japanese game shows where they have to eat the rubber grips off of a full set of golf clubs before the goldfish swims through the pipe and into your trousers. Maybe I’m over doing it with the fibre and all these fresh vegetables I’m eating as part of my wedding-diet. Its one thing to be regular but its another to go through a roll of Andrex a day and half a can of air-freshener.

I check the Sopwell web-site once again, just to make sure that this time we really do have the date correct. It seems that today is the day for booking a wedding, so we depart for the venue for the second time in 24 hours. It’s a bit quiet in the car on the way over, I think it’s because we were thinking the same thing : ‘The venue was spot-on, I could see us getting married there – but I bet they haven’t got any dates we want…..”. We both had this fear and using the old scientific formula of ‘if you don’t talk about it, it might not happen’, we travelled in near silence to St.Albans.

About a week earlier one of my best mates, Paul, had sent out his first tentative email wedding invitation for 28th October 2006. Paul & Suze had got engaged on Christmas Day and had started in earnest the planning process of their big day. It really wouldn’t be good form to book our wedding too close to theirs and we had other events to consider, my parents 40th anniversary, my golf holiday, Christmas and not straying into 2007 as Pippa’s brother was getting married that year and I believe it’s a family tradition for only one sibling to marry per annum. With all these dates to juggle, finding a venue that we liked with available ‘marriage slots’ was going to be tough, we even tossed the idea around of a Friday wedding, but Pippa wasn’t keen on taking a day off work. To help simplify this vexatious matter I designed a simple ‘Potential Wedding Date Chart’ or PWDC as we called it, which neatly identified good and bad weekends, but also rated the good weekends to get married with a system of one to three thumbs, thus indicating our degree of anticipated glee if we were to nab such a date.

As we turned into the gravelled driveway of Sopwell, the mass of cars parked everywhere signalled either very busy wedding fayre or the cub scouts were round the back offering £2.50 car washes, either way parking was going to be a bastard. Parking for me is a bit like diamonds, I know naff all about it. Sure I know the basics about either driving into a space forwards, then using the ‘R’ gear to go backwards when you want to leave. But anything that involves moving and turning the wheel at the same time to get into a space I seem to find a little bit tricky, a bit like those windy metal things that beep when the hoop touches it that you had at the school fete. It’s a co-ordination thing, give me a parking slot with a space either side, even if I have to park half a mile away to find it. Eventually we did find a space (with a gap on each side) and the stroll from the car to reception was good exercise.

As we entered, we were greeted with by a toastmaster behind the reception desk, he was very friendly and jolly as he asked us to fill in a registration card. I smiled politely at him and whispered in his ear “You’ve got more chance of riding Jodie Marsh like a space hopper round the grounds of this hotel than you have of me paying you a hundred and fifty quid to shout dinner is served at my wedding”. Obviously I didn’t actually whisper this in his ear, it’s just that I have east-end gangster delusions when I wear my ¾ length leather coat out in public.

We wandered around the fayre in a fairly non-committal manner, not getting too close to the various people offering wedding services and products just in case they asked us when we were getting married or how many were coming etc, as we hadn’t got a clue. We did linger a little longer at a cake stall as they were offering what appeared to be free slices of chocolate cake, this made it worthwhile talking to the, what I guessed to be, a man and wife team of wedding cake makers. They talked about layers, stands, hand-made, sugar-craft, lemon, fruit, chocolate, individuals and leaving some for your first baby or something – this was all confusing so I just asked her “How much would a cake like that be” as I pointed at a random three-tier iced cake with flowers on it. “Three to four hundred pound, but you can go up to seven hundred with the decoration and if you have personalised icing”. It was like buying a Mercedes and being offered all the optional extras like heated seats at £1500 a pop. Now I know for a fact that just before Christmas, Sainsbury’s had a good selection of fair sized Christmas cakes at just under a tenner and I reckon that four or five of the Sainsbury’s cakes would feed just as many people as the ‘hand made, sugar crafted, marzipan statue’ in front of me. This was one of those times to keep one’s thoughts to oneself, through fear of showing my ‘wedding ignorance’ about such matters.

Eventually we joined a short queue of happy couples or brides to be with their parents who were waiting to speak to the wedding coordinator of Sopwell itself. Our turn came and we both started talking at the same time “We want to get married, were engaged and we'd like to, like to, what dates have you got free this year” we babbled between us. “Let me see” said Angela, as she flicked through her Letts diary of wedding bookings and consulted a flipchart of provisional bookings taken earlier. “I can do May the sixth, if that’s any good for you?” – that’s only sixteen weeks away I thought, no way on earth can we organise everything that quickly, well I’m sure we could if we tried, it was just a bit scary that it could be that soon. “We were actually looking for later in the year if you have anything?” Pippa replied, as she could see that the mention of ‘May’ had made me start to twitch. “I’ve got a couple in December and November, oh and I’ve got the twenty sixth of August, which is a bank holiday”, Angela responded as she made scribbled pencil marks on her booking sheets. Pippa and I stared at each other with that unified look of bemusement when you both wonder at the same time “Did you lock the back door or did I?”. We couldn’t actually work out if having a bank holiday wedding was a good thing or a bad thing, if it was a good thing then why was it available, had a couple booked it previously, then discovered that its bad luck to get married on a bank holiday and cancelled it? What the hell “Can you put us down for the twenty sixth please, both of us, thanks”.

Then we began to think of all the reasons why a bank holiday is not a good wedding day. Everyone will be on holiday, it’s probably half term as well, a lot of people book bank holidays in advance, but sod it we thought. It was going to be a dam site warmer in August that it would be in November or December which were our original thoughts and it also meant that Pippa would have to take one day less off work for the honeymoon.

After booking the provisional date, we made a couple of phone calls to close friends just to check that it didn’t clash with any current plans, so far we were in the clear. We had sort of lost interest by this point, we had got what we came for, a date, everything else now could wait a little bit. So we had a bit more cake that was going for free, I needed to save a bit of money as I was down to only £3.25 in cash in my pocket after being charged £2.50 for a cup of coffee only minutes earlier. When you’re engaged you can’t get away with just buying yourself a cup, you really do have to buy one each and Pippa didn’t like the idea of sharing.

After another circuit of the hall consisting of expensive photographers, creative wedding jewellery designers and suit hire, we decided to leave, our work here was done. The walk back to the car was very excited and bubbly, we were very pleased that in our first weekend of venue searching we had found and booked, albeit provisional, a wedding date. However we were barely 3 miles down the road when collective wedding paranoia kicked in, “We will have to get in touch with them tomorrow and arrange to go back over there, just run through things again, get something in writing and probably pay a deposit” insisted Pippa, with some obvious concern in her voice. “Don’t worry sweetheart, Angela wrote down all the details, she has our name in for that date we're sound, they’ll contact us in due course” I reassured her, but inside I was a bit worried that with all these people trying to book dates it would be possible to end up being double booked. And if the other wedding had more guests or promised to go for the champagne and not sparkling wine for the toasts, they would probably win favour with Angela and we would be wedding-less. I acted relaxed, carried on driving and tried to forget about weddings for a bit. We did have a date though, but how provisional was provisional?

Me.....24 Hours Early.....How Did That Happen ?

After washing out the wheelie bin, and another Tassimo coffee, we realised that we that we really needed to launch this wedding project, we should toss some ideas at the wall and see what sticks, we needed to get our arses in gear. To the internet......

A few clicks later, we came across an advert on the Sopwell House page that stated Wedding Fayre - all your weeding needs in one luxurious venue. Now I had previously ruled out Sopwell as a potential wedding, having been there as a guest at three other weddings (other peoples). Not that I hadn't enjoyed the weddings, far from it, I just thought that I wanted somewhere different. Pippa expalined to me what a Wedding Fayre was and that it would be good to get some ideas on prices of cakes, dresses, wedding underwear, bridal mascara and all sorts of things that I never knew existed.

It was 2:30pm, I could make it to Sopwell in under 30 minutes, that would give us over an hour there, so it was worth the journey. To make the trip even more pleasurable, I popped a DVD in the car, Sinatra- Davis Jnr - Martin - a Rat Pack concert performance. Now it's obviously illegal to watch these movies whilst driving, so we only watched snippets when the car was stationery and in Neutral (yeah right!!). It made the journey fly by as we tunelessly hummed & sang along to some of the swing greats of yesteryear.

Pulling into the driveway of Sopwell, a large luxury coach was parked in front of the reception with engine running. We were soon to discover that the Liverpool team had stayed at Sopwell the previous night before travelling to Kenilworth road for what was to be an 8 goal thriller watched by 8.4 million viewers on BBC at 5:30pm that evening. Liverpool fans were packed into the reception area, autograph book in one hand and hub cap from the car-park in the other. For a brief moment as I walked into reception, I thought some young fan might think I was a little known Liverpool reserve player and ask for my signature. Then I remembered that I'm 37 and four stone overweight and I look more like a retired sumo than a premiership footballer.

We stode purposely upto the reception desk to be greeted by a Thai receptionist "Herro, how can I relp you?" she beamed at us with little bit of satay sauce on her tooth. "We're here for the wedding show" I replied. "Wish wedding yoo want - Wichards or Smedlee ?" she enquired, obviously thinking that we were either early for the reception of late for the ceremony of someone elses wedding. "No.......we.....want....the.....wedding.....show", I spelt out for her with gaping gaps between words. "wedding show tomorrow mister, yoo come too early" she beamed back at me. Now to be told I got the date wrong and get a personal insult in one sentence was too much. I was more annoyed with myslef than embarassed, I hate getting things wrong and I obviously had not read the information on the internet correctly.

Rather than waste the opportunity, I gave Pippa a quick tour of the venue based on my potted memories of several previous drunken weddings. Pippa instantly liked the place, she hadn't said so, but I could tell. I could read her face, she was waiting to tell me that this was the place that we were going to get married in, she may not tell me today, ideally she would like me to work it out, but at some point in the next 24 hours, I would be told the at this would be the venue where I would eventually do my 'I DO'.

You Can't Fool Me with a Gravel Driveway

It's amazing how when you subconsciously do not want to do something that you find a hundred little jobs that need doing just to avoid the inevitable. This Saturday morning was no different, I arranged the wooden spoons in size order in the drawer, threw out all the spent matches in the match box that lives behind the candles.

Our appointment was 11:30am at Flitwick Manor, to meet the wedding co-ordinator and be thrilled by the unrivalled package of wedding services they could offer.

The real benefit to me of having Sat-Nav installed in the car, is not that I can drive straight to any location in Europe guided by the dulcet tones of 'Sat-Nav-Bird', it's the fact that the system will actually tell me how late I am going to be. I'm nearly always late for stuff, but now I can ring ahead with confidence and state "I am 12.7 miles away which means I will me 27 minnutes late for our meeting". If you're going to be late, it's best to be late with confidence.

As it turned out we were only 5 minutes late for our appointment, although it may be the fashion of the day for brides to be a little late at the ceremony, the look on the face of the wedding co-ordinator told me that it wasn't fashionable to be late for appointments with her.

We started our tour of this micro-stately-home, and within minutes, knew that this was not going to be the real deal. With a main ceremony/reception room about twice the size of my lounge and a bar the size of a small kitchen worktop with no draught beers, we smiled politely, said we'd be in touch and left.

I had hoped that choosing a wedding venue would be simple and that we could literally book the first place we saw, after all we had done over 45 minutes research on the internet to find the ideal venue. We both felt a bit deflated by this, not that we were going to give up easily, just that we were annoyed that we were going to have to put some more effort into this 'getting married' thing.

At times like this, when a couple need that special something to lift their spirits, I like to think that I have a few tricks up my sleeve to put the sparkle back into Pippa's eye. So we called into the local garden centre and purchased a bird feeder and a mega value pack of bird seed. It did the trick, we had a new common interest and a short term goal, get home fill bird feeder hang in tree and wait for the tits & robins to come a flocking.

Feeding wild birds is not all it's cracked up to be, three days that bird feeder hung from the branch before the first feathered diner decided to drop in for a sunflower seed snack. I felt disappointed again, so I decided to achieve something - I washed out the wheelie bin with bleach and boiling water - I felt better.