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'.