fell in love with a girl.....

Two years ago today, I got married to my beautiful wife in sunny Vienna, surrounded by my friends and family.



That was a good day.

marchons, marchons....

Say what you like about the French, but I think you have to admire a society with a bureaucracy so well developed. Now that's the real mark of an advanced civilisation, isn't it? At this time of great global economic uncertainty, I think it is reassuring to know that there is at least one country in the world where a clerical job can still be found (or created) for almost anyone with the power to push a pen around a form and to tut authoritatively and impatiently and with just the right air of simultaneous impatience and resignation.

You may remember the shocking revelation that C's marriage to me is not formally recognised in France. My marriage to her is all kosher, but as a French citizen, it turns out that there were one or two hoops that she failed to jump through that would have made the union fully legal on French soil.

It's okay though, after an approriately long period of tut-tutting and barely concealed disapproval at her marriage to an Englishman, it turns out that we can do a lot of this stuff retrospectively. All we needed to complete was the following:

-> A formal request on behalf of the bride and the groom requesting a certificate of no impediment from the French Embassy in Vienna. One form each for bride and groom, obviously. Doing them both on the same form would be completely unacceptable. Naturally, completing the form requires that you provide the full names, addresses and occupations of both sets of parents. Pertinent information, I'm sure you'll agree.

-> A form explaining what pre-nuptial agreement (if any) was being put in place and listing any children.

-> A certified copy of the groom's birth certificate.

-> An official extract from the official translation of the bride's birth certificate (which must be specially requested and must be less than three months old... because you know, birth certificates are subject to an awful lot of change over time.

-> Proof of the bride's French nationality in the form of a certified copy of the Father of the bride's naturalisation papers (a copy that must be certified by a specific French official, not just any notary, you understand). This had to be provided even though the birth certificate above contains an official statement on the bride's naturalisation status.

-> A certified copy of the bride's passport and French ID card.

-> A certified copy of the groom's passport.

-> The registration number by which the bride is registered with the French Embassy in London as a French citizen abroad (...but that's a wholly different set of paperwork to get that sorted, of course)

-> Proof of residence in the form of an original (not a copy, no matter how certified it is) council tax bill.

-> A certified extract from the original Austrian marriage register.

-> Another official form, completed by the French spouse, requesting the transcription of the wedding into French and its entry onto the French register. The wedding certificate we have is in both German and French already... but that's apparently not good enough and an official French copy has to be made.

-> Two A5 envelopes (no other size of envelope acceptable)

-> International Answer Coupons (your guess is as good as mine) to a value of 3 Euros 20 cents.

Thank heavens that the bureaucrats were big enough to waive the normal requirement to publish the bans of the wedding in the French Embassy in Vienna for 10 days (what would they do if someone objected?) and they didn't ask for us to have the pre-nuptial medical that is compulsory in a French marriage....although they may yet ask us to attend the French Embassy in Austria in person for inspection.

Given that we actually got married in June 2007, I'd like to think that the last 15 months of paper-pushing has kept at least two people in full employment in the French embassy and in the associated departments that certify documents and produce the official forms working solely on our behalf.

God love'em. By way of contrast, to make the marriage legal in the UK, we didn't actually have to do anything at all. We could, apparently, provide a copy of the marriage certificate to our local registrar, but it's really not necessary and so we didn't bother. The Austrian marriage certificate (written in German and in French, but not in English) was also more than good enough for C to get a new British passport issued in her married name.

...and we wonder why there are so many unemployed people in this country, eh? Think of all those paperwork possibilities we're missing out on.

Of course, once all of this essential documentation has been processed and approved by the relevant authorities and our marriage is fully recognised in France, I will be fully entitled, as the spouse of a French national, to apply for citzenship.

Now, I imagine there may be one or two forms to fill in, but I'd assume nothing too arduous and certainly nothing that's going to stop me from reaching that particular nirvana, let me tell you..... Did you know that when you finally get awarded your French nationality, you are obliged to attend a ceremony where you are formally handed your very own Citizen's Clipboard?*

*possibly.

signing the letters and cutting the costs...

It turns out that we're not legally married in France. Well, that's not strictly true: we were married in Vienna, and Austria, Britain and France are all members of the European Union, so our marriage is fully recognised across Europe and presumably therefore across the rest of the world. Except in France. In France, although my marriage to C. is also recognised, her marriage to me is not considered binding enough for them to issue her a new French passport in her married name.

The reason? Bureaucracy. France is the country that places great store by paperwork and there are large swathes of civil servants whose jobs seem to consist entirely of pushing red tape backwards and forwards to each other, for a fee. Now, I can understand the need for a certain amount of paperwork: before we could get married in Vienna, we had to produce a number of pieces of documentation proving that we were who we said we were and that there was no impediment to our marriage. That only seems sensible, and we got those with very little trouble from our local registry office, and that was more than good enough for the Austrians. We thought that was going to be good enough for everyone, but apparently we were wrong.

The French have certain special requirements around marriage, and one of the reasons that we didn't get married in France in the first place was the sheer logistical complexity of needing to have at least one partner resident on French soil for 40 days. Amongst the other many hoops that you have to jump through to be allowed to marry in France, you must produce a pre-nuptial medical certificate proving that you have been checked by a doctor.

Austria just seemed easier, and it was an excellent choice and a lovely day.

In the process of changing her name, in due course, C. applied for a new French passport and identity card. It was at this point that the problem arose: to be considered legally married in France, C. was supposed to have published the banns at the French embassy in Vienna (which naturally attracts a fee). If we wanted to have our marriage fully recognised in France, then we were going to have to present all the paperwork from the wedding itself to the embassy whilst also going through the whole application process retrospectively, possibly including presenting ourselves in person in Vienna, and maybe needing a medical.

Brilliant.

As a result of all of this, I received a phone call at 08:05 one morning last week whilst C. was away in Paris.

"Hello"

[long, garbled string of French]

"Hello?"

[long, now slightly irritated sounding garbled string of French. The penny drops that this call may be for C.]

"Ah, I'm afraid that she's not here at the moment...."

[I'm cut off by some very terse language from a now slightly annoyed sounding frenchman, from which I deduce that this is the French embassy in Vienna and that therefore this must be about the legality of our marriage. I'm mildy irritated that this man has a) rung a number in the UK this early and b) that he seems surprised that I'm speaking English to him. The cheek! I begin to dredge through my brain for the appropriate words.]

"Ma femme est a Paris"

[The man on the other end of the phone is encouraged by my use of French to speak a little faster and ends on an upward note, indicating that he has just asked me a question and now expects some kind of a reply.]

"Elle retour a [I mentally call off the days of the week...lundi, mardi, mecredi, jeudi...] vendredi...?"

[The frenchman is placated by this, and speaks a bit more but is obviously winding down. I say "OK" a few times in what feel like the appropriate places. He finally hangs up. I realise as soon as I put the phone down that C. isn't in fact going to be back until Friday night, so make a mental note to let the phone ring out to the answering machine until she's back, just in case...]

Of course, all of this makes the possibility of me applying for French nationality (to which I am entitled through marriage) all the more enticing. I imagine it'll be a cinch with barely any paperwork or petty bureaucracy at all....

And, of course, I imagine that the French simply can't wait to have me.....

and it burns, burns, burns....

I nearly washed my wedding ring down a sink last week.

Anyone who has seen the pictures of me at the wedding struggling to force that same ring over the broken knuckle on my ring-finger will realise just what this means: it means that after something like 4 months since that fateful game of basketball, the swelling in my joint is finally going down. Mind you, I didn't have much time to celebrate this fact as the sinks at work don't have a grill over the plugholes (no, I don't know either), so I had to act pretty fast to avoid the need to go and fetch a plumber.

Later on that same day, I was shaking my hands after washing them, and the ring flew off my finger, requiring some quick reactions to catch it before it sailed across the room.

Clearly time for an adjustment then.

This is actually a visit I have been putting off for a while. I have been doing this partly because I know that the swelling in my knuckle will go down gradually, and I didn't want to get the ring adjusted once, only to have to take it back a month or so later. If I'm totally honest though, the delay was also equally due to the fact that I am mental: I had become fascinated by the way that my once shiny and new ring was wearing... to the extent that I was almost worried about getting it back from the jeweler, all perfect again, only to have to go through the pain of watching that perfection disappear, one scratch at a time.

Yes, I realise that this is irrational.

Yes, I realise that it is entirely inevitable that something I wear on my finger is going to get banged and scraped and a little bit bashed (which is one of the reasons I opted for a platinum ring in the first place, as it's harder than gold).

Yes, I realise that all I have to do is to get the ring polished once in a while - which if free, by the way - and it would all be as good as new again.

I know all of this, and yet it was still virtually inevitable that I was going to fret about this -- anyone who knows what I am like with my glasses (amongst other things) would have been able to predict that. And I did fret, right from the first moment that I looked at the ring in its box, before I had even put the damn thing on, and saw some tiny surface scratches caused by the initial polishing. Once I started wearing the ring, there was no holding me back. I think I'm looking at my ring in almost every single one of those photos.

Perhaps "fret" is too strong a word. I think "mesmerised" might be better. I simply found it fascinating. I'd never worn a ring before, so I was acutely conscious of it on my finger and of every knock that it took in the course of a normal day. I just wasn't able to equate the things that I did with the marks that were appearing on my ring.

Of course, after a while I started to get used to wearing it, and I stopped looking at it quite as often. I still looked, naturally, but I think that the ring stopped looking scratched (bad) as much as having character (good). So, not only was I now getting reconciled to this, but I was even tentatively starting to like the way it looked.

And then I got the ring re-sized (it was made 4 sizes smaller) and it came back all shiny again, and I was facing up to the prospect of scuffing it up all over again.

As it happens, I haven't really had any time to worry about that as something else has come up.... quite literally. It's been quite hot here over the last few days, and the higher temperatures coupled with the process in the jewelers of trying on sample rings for size and taking them off again, putting my own ring on as it was being resized and taking it off again... all of this has combined to irritate the joint in my finger to such an extent that it has swollen up again. Not so much that the ring was compressing my finger, but enough that I couldn't get it on and off without a struggle. The best thing would therefore be to leave it well alone, but as my finger continued to swell, I couldn't stop myself trying to see if I could still get the ring off, irritating the joint more and more each time I tried.

In the end, I have had to take the thing off entirely and will have to wait a few days to see if the joint goes down again (now the ring is smaller, it no longer fits on the finger of my right hand either).

And you know what else?

I was just putting the ring back in its box, when I noticed a mark......

Gah!

Es war Wien, war Vienna...

What follows is a long and probably very boring post. I feel like I need to apologise for this in advance, but if I don’t write about this damn wedding soon then I’m going to forget what happened.

I joke of course. How could I forget a day like that?

No really.

Burned in my mind.

*cough*

Anyway.

I don’t know if you’d heard, but a little over a week ago, I got married. It was in Vienna actually.

We flew out to Austria on Thursday, and whilst I was waiting for the bags, I bumped into a couple of reprobates from the wedding party at the same carousel, just collecting their bags from the flight from Rome. I had family duties that night (which seemed to mainly involve drinking wine and eating schnitzel), but I was able to start gathering people up on Friday afternoon… which meant that whilst C. was busy flower arranging, I found a bar and with through some judicious use of my mobile phone, and with the help of those scoundrels from Rome, we created a coalition of the willing. Several hours – and several beers later – I seemed to be having the ‘stag’ do that I was determined to avoid. Oh well. What can you do? Not eating probably wasn’t a great idea though.

We finished up at the bar on the fake beach on the Danube canal next to the swimming pool bar. It was that kind of night.

And when I looked in the mirror the next morning, it suddenly felt like that kind of night too.

Ooops.

Luckily the ceremony wasn’t until 2pm, so I had plenty of time to gather my thoughts and to find out where I’d left my eyeballs.

It was a beautiful day in Vienna. It was over 30 degrees and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A couple of cups of coffee and some breakfast cake and I was feeling vaguely human and just about ready to go and get married.

The Rathaus is essentially the town hall. It’s the first district of Vienna’s equivalent of a registry office. It’s also an extremely impressive building.



C. and I arrived before everyone else and we were lucky enough to meet a friendly fire marshall who took enormous pride in what had been his place of work for the last 27 years and showed us around some of the rooms usually closed to the public, including the council chamber that had some very impressive paintings and a massive chandelier that apparently weighed 3500kg and could comfortably fit 10 people inside the main bowl.

Hmm.

By now guests were starting to arrive and we were pretty much ready to begin. The ceremony itself seemed to take about 2 minutes, and then to the question of whether or not I would take this woman to be my wife, a simple “Yes I will” and I was married. Our hosts, the Gottfrieds, are an extremely accomplished family: Clemenz is in a horn quartet, Stefan is a concert pianist, and Susi, Maria, Michi and Peter are beautiful singers. Between them they managed to pad the ceremony out to half an hour or so, and it was wonderful. Even the bit where I had to shove a wedding ring over a broken finger.



Done, we wandered out of the Rathaus, across the road and into Café Landtmann for coffee and cakes. Somehow that doesn’t seem to do it justice. It wasn’t just any coffee and cakes – this was coffee and cakes from one of the oldest coffee houses in one of the best coffee cultures in the world. Some people – and I’m not pointing any fingers here – may have helped themselves to more than one piece of cake…. But that was okay. It was excellent cake.

From there, the wedding party hopped onto a tram and went on a private tour of the ring, taking in the various sites of central Vienna – the Opera house, the Museums Quartier, the Hoffburg… all that jazz, with Peter and Susi acting as our guides

Apparently Austria is quite a rural country.



Then… after a short pause of a couple of hours for everyone to gather their thoughts, we gathered again at the Fuhrgassl-Huber heuriger (or wine garden) for the evening bash. We had some delicious champagne that had been lovingly brought over from France by the bride’s father. We had some tasty Austrian wine. We had a lovely spread of traditional Viennese food (which is mainly fried, but there’s nothing wrong with that once in a while, eh?). We had speeches. It was a “no speech” wedding, but we had speeches from the Austrian contingent (Clemenz), the father of the bride, the best man, and what could perhaps politely be called a speech by the groom, but was really nothing of the sort, and mainly involved handing out gifts.

And then (after a spot of yodelling from the remarkable Gottfrieds), the disco. The DJs (C’s brother Jake and Statue John) were superb, and even the accidental punching of a waitress in the nose during “Kung Fu Fighting” couldn’t quite put a dampner on the night. We didn’t get to play every song in the end, but the cheese carried the day and Statue John finished us off with the triple whammy of “Ghostbusters”, “Dancing on the Ceiling” and “Vienna”. A few brave souls moved on to a club, I went to bed with my wife.

It was a beautiful, happy, perfect day and I don't think that I could ever hope to do it justice in a blog post. What can I say? I was happy to get married to my beautiful wife, and I was also very happy that so many of our closest friends and family were there to share the day with us.



You can see loads of Hen's fabulous photos of the day here.

And that's it.

Well, except for a gratuitous photo of the bride and groom with Mozart (that reknowned Viennese chocolatier)


It's going to be pretty much all Glastonbury around here from now on, I'm afraid.

***

*UPDATE*

Oh, and I forgot to mention.... thanks to the generosity of our friends and families, and in lieu of us having a traditional wedding list, we raised well over £1,000 in sheep, goats, toilets, clean water, condom kits, manure, teachers and in cash donations for Oxfam and for the MS Society.

Well done everyone!

Oh, my shiftless body...

Look. It's getting late and I'm sat here watching a DVD of the pilot episode for the new "Battlestar Galactica". I think I might as well face it: I'm not going to get around to writing that post about the wedding tonight.

Do you know what I'm going to do instead?

I'm going to watch the end of the pilot and then I'm going to go to bed with my lovely wife.

Life's a bitch, huh?

Hasta mañana.

---

Incidentally, in case my post below wasn't very clear, I'm going to be blogging Glastonbury for the BBC. They've sent me a smartphone, and I was having a play with the application I'm supposed to be using.

I'll be posting here, and then the feed will get syndicated to the BBC Glastonbury website.

Incidentally, although I'm very pleased that they asked me to do it, I wouldn't want you to think that they approached me completely out of the blue or that I'm going to be the only person doing this. I responded to a request for volunteers, and I guess they must have thought that I looked like a responsible sort. I imagine that I will be one amongst many.

Well, it should be fun, right?

ah, vienna....

Hello. No time to chat really - we're still in Vienna and about to go out for a delicious lunch.

Suffice it to say that everything went beautifully and that it was a perfect day

Hen is in the process of putting up loads more of her fantastic photos here....and of course I'll be back with the whole story when I get home.

Hope you're all doing ok. We're doing great!

like a river flows surely to the sea....

OK people, that's it: I don't think I'm going to get another chance to blog before we leave for Vienna. For one reason or another, my dad is picking us up tomorrow night to take us down to their place so that we can all travel down to Heathrow together on Thursday morning. Although they're willing and curious travellers, my mum and dad don't really go anywhere much on their own - they prefer going with more adventurous friends. They're naturally very excited about the trip, but they're fretful about all sorts of things, from whether or not there's going to be enough car parking at Heathrow all the way through to a concern that they won't take Mastercard in Austria....

So anyway. I've just got to pack (rings? check. suit? check. fiancée? .....wait a second.....check.) and get through the day in the office tomorrow, and then we're on our way.

I'm really looking forward to it. It will be nice to celebrate the day and to celebrate our relationship with some of my closest friends and family. We're having the ceremony in the Rathaus in Vienna on Saturday, followed by a bit of a private tram ride around the city and then the reception and party at a wine garden on the hills above the city. It should be fun.

See you on the other side.

(there may be pictures)

you make me want to shout....

If you were to ask C what has been occupying her time the most in the planning of this wedding, then I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you how she’s been busy with things like making sure that we have the right paperwork, that the registrar is booked and that the venue is sorted is booked, that we send out travel information and details of various hotels and things to our guests….

Meanwhile, I’ve been focusing on the really important stuff… like making sure that we have some decent music played at the reception. This process started when we invited our guests to nominate two songs on their RSVP, it continued as we made the important decision of what our first dance should be ("Fell in Love With A Girl" by the White Stripes), and then moved on into an active discussion with the two DJs about what music should be played at what stage of the evening. At one point, and at the request of one of the DJs, I even spent a ridiculous amount of time carefully thinking up a list of the ten (-ish) songs that I wanted to be used as a sample of my taste in music and as a guide for the kind of songs that I would want played.

Now that’s an almost impossible task? That changes minute by minute. How would you sum up your music taste in ten songs? What can you get away with at a wedding? Is anything fair game?

Anyway. I digress.

I’ve talked about this before, but my choice of songs was:

> "Apply Some Pressure" / "Our Velocity" - Maximo Park
> "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" - The Arctic Monkeys
> "Son of a Preacher Man" - Dusty Springfield
> "This Charming Man" - The Smiths
> "Blister in the Sun" - Violent Femmes
> "Substitute" - The Who
> "Feel Good Inc" - Gorillaz
> "Crazy" - Gnarls Barkley
> "Nutbush City Limits" - Ike & Tina Turner
> "My Sharona" - The Knack
> "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" - Eels
> "And She Was" - Talking Heads
> "Twist and Shout" / "Daytripper" / "Back in the USSR" - The Beatles

C. also came up with a list of ten songs.

> “Shout” - The Alex Harvey Soul Band
> “Crazy in Love” - Beyonce
> “Tamacun” / “Diablo Rojo” - Rodrigo and Gabriella
> “Hey Ya!” - Outcast
> “Fun, fun, fun” - Beach Boys
> “Don't Stop” - S Club 7
> “Uptown girl” - Billy Joel
> “Spitting Games” - Snow Patrol
> “A little less conversation” - JXL Radio Edit Remix/Elvis
> “Jolene" - Dolly Parton

Not a bad list from my girl there, I think you’ll agree.

Of that lot, the only song that the DJs were struggling to get hold of was the Alex Harvey Soul Band version of the Isley Brothers song “Shout” (yes, the same one that was later made famous by Lulu). When we were in Birmingham, I popped into a big record shop to see if I could find the elusive song and make my fiancée very happy indeed. After a bit of searching, I found what I was looking for on a 2 CD retrospective of Harvey’s career. It was £10… but to be honest, I’ve spent a lot more than that on other things for this wedding, so I wasn’t really in the mood to quibble too much. Besides, I quite like the Sensational Alex Harvey Band - their demented, thickly accented cover of Brel’s “Next” is the best version of the song that I’ve heard by far (better even than the Scott Walker version!).

So I bought it.

We popped the CD on in the car to give it a listen as we drove home. “Shout” is the opening track on the first CD, and it’s a great record. I’m sure you know it, but it’s sure to get more or less any party moving. The rest of the songs on that first CD are all pretty good, but I was keen to get onto the second disc and to listen to some of the later Sensational Alex Harvey band stuff that I was a bit more familiar with…. So I ejected the CD.

Or at least, I tried to eject the CD, but the button appears to have broken. The CD works fine, there just appears to be no simple way of getting the disc back out again.

So there we are… with about a week to go before we leave for Vienna, and the CD containing the last song that we need for the wedding reception is now stuck in C’s car.

Arse.

just you stood there only in your underwear....

When it comes to the world of fashion, I have - in the main - lived a life of blissful ignorance. Of course, I can't claim to be entirely label blind. Who can? Since I first left university and got myself a job, I have gradually spent more and more money on what I wear. I've never spent all that much, but the more money I had, the more likely I was to spend that cash on clothes. I used to get my jeans from Marks & Spencer, then I moved on to Gap and now I buy from Diesel... there's no question that I have started to buy labels, although I like to think that as a result I look better. I hope it will be a cold day in hell before I buy something with a label just because it has a label. Versace jeans? Hmmm. I don't think so.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so definitive. After all, until today, I still bought my pants from M&S or John Lewis.

So what changed today?

Today I went to the first fitting of my wedding suit. This is where I get to try it on for the first time and the tailor gets to work out what tweaks he still needs to make to get the suit just so. It looks brilliant, but as I pulled on the trousers in the fitting room, I experienced something for the first time, something that has never happened to me in the past. I'm sure this sounds ridiculous -- and ladies, please feel free to snigger at this point -- but normally when I step into a pair of trousers, it's a simple matter of pulling them up and doing them up. Job done. Apparently it's different with tailored trousers, and I found that I needed to sort of wiggle my hips into them before I could do them up. Once over my hips, they fit fine and looked fantastic..... except for one detail..... I appeared to have developed VPL.

Now. I don't really have a general theory about different types of underwear, but I do know that I've always liked boxer shorts. They're nice and airy and comfortable. Unfortunately, they also have a lot of surplus material. Under normal circumstances, and in my normal everyday trousers, this has never been a problem. Apparently, in more closely fitting tailored trousers, this results in a visible panty line.

Bugger.

The tailor was very polite about it, but the bottom line was that I was required to go out and buy some more styled pants.

And so, dear reader, I walked out of the door of Gieves & Hawkes in the Mailbox in Birmingham, I turned right and I walked the 25m down to Harvey Nichols. Once in Harvey Nichols, I bought myself a pair of Calvin Klein 365 trunks.

I'm wearing them right now, and -- if you'll pardon the overshare -- I'm finding them a little clinging.

And so I have discovered something that wiser people than me (many of them women) have known for centuries: you think I wake up looking this good?

gonna end up a big old pile of them bones....

How many times in your life will you specifically need the third finger on your left hand? In conjunction with the other digits, I suppose it's useful enough, but you'd imagine that - at a pinch, and if you really had to - you could manage without it.....

....unless you were getting married in the next few weeks.

Any other time in my life, damaging your ring finger would be annoying and perhaps a touch inconvenient, but it would be something that could be shrugged off and quickly forgotten about. This is more or less exactly what I did in 1991 when I dislocated this finger at the second joint whilst playing rugby. It hurt. It swelled up. I had to strap it up for a few weeks. The joint warped a bit. That was about it. No big deal.

Fast forward 15 years, and I pinged the same joint whilst playing basketball with the Ultimate Olympian at the very end of March. I had a small sense of deja-vu as the joint swelled up and I had to strap my poor finger up, but I wasn't especially worried about it.

Fast forward a month, and the bruising had gone down but the joint itself remained painful and swollen, and - with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight - perhaps I can now admit that taking that stint in goal at football a couple of weeks ago wasn't the smartest of ideas.... I'm rubbish in goals on the whole, but on this occasion I was pulling off some very unlikely reflex saves, mainly with my left hand. I initially felt pretty pleased with myself, but by the end of the game, it was also fairly clear that I was finally going to have to go to the doctor to get this damn finger checked out.

I went last Tuesday and the doctor immediately sent me off for an X-ray and told me to immobilise the finger by strapping it to my middle finger.

I got the x-ray results today.

I've broken my finger.

I don't know yet if it's a clean fracture or if a splinter of bone has broken off and gone through the joint... but 5 or 6 weeks after the original injury, it should have mostly cleared up by now, and obviously it hasn't. I may yet have to take the Frodo Baggins approach and wear the Ring of Power on a chain round my neck for a bit before I can cast it into Mount Doom wear it on my finger.

Ooops.

No, it's much better to face these kinds of things with a sense of poise and rationality...

Sorry to go on about the wedding, but there's now less than 5 weeks to go, so it's starting to loom rather large on the horizon. Today's been a good day though. Not only have I found a pair of shoes (subject to them finding a pair in my size), but I have also spent a happy hour or so watching Mark Selby's lazarus-like comeback at the Crucible and thinking about the music that will be played at the reception.

I've left most of the detailed planning work for the big day to C, but as music's plays such an important part in my life, this is one area where I have been happy to get involved. I also thought it was an area where it would be nice to get everyone else involved too, and so the wedding invitations went out with space on the RSVP for people to request a couple of songs to be played at the reception (subject to veto, obviously - how stupid do you think I am?). We're having a couple of fantastic DJs on the night too: C's brother Jake (a sometime professional musician) will be taking a shift, as will Statue John, who will -- I hope -- be ensuring that the cheese quotient is kept high enough by playing classics by legends like Lionel Richie, Falco, Ray Parker Jr and Ultravox (of course).

Jake asked us to each put together a list of ten songs that he can use to get a flavour of the kind of things he should play on the night. This isn't a trivial task by any means, and it certainly isn't one that I'm going to take lightly.... so I had a good think about this whilst I was watching Mark Selby's fantastic comeback in the snooker.

Here's what I've got so far:

> "Apply Some Pressure" - Maximo Park
> "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor" - The Arctic Monkeys
> "Son of a Preacher Man" - Dusty Springfield
> "This Charming Man" - The Smiths
> "Blister in the Sun" - Violent Femmes
> "Substitute" - The Who
> "Feel Good Inc" - Gorillaz
> "Crazy" - Gnarls Barkley
> "Nutbush City Limits" - Ike & Tina Turner
> "My Sharona" - The Knack
> "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" - Eels
> "And She Was" - Talking Heads

... and I was also thinking of adding something like "Back in the USSR" or "Twist & Shout" by the Beatles.

I know that's not ten records. Bite me. My main selection criteria were that I wanted a good range of songs and quite a lot of jump-about-ability. Beyond that, anything goes....

Anything you'd add? I'll stick any good suggestions onto the playlist.

We've also given some thought to what should be the song for our first dance. Again, not something to be taken lightly. Sentimentality is to be avoided at all costs, as is something that will require me to actually do any proper dancing. The favourite at the moment is "Fell In Love With A Girl" by the White Stripes. It ticks all the boxes: it's apt, it rocks and -- crucially -- it's only 1 minute 50 seconds long.

Perfect. Now this is what bank holidays should be all about.

for others I put on a show....

I've been looking for a pair of shoes.

Normally this is not something I spend a great deal of time worrying about. I actually already have more pairs of shoes than C, although I'm hardly Imelda Marcos: most of my shoes are really very functional (studded football boots, 5-a-side football boots, outdoor running shoes, indoor gym trainers... that kind of thing). The problem is that I don't really have very much in the way of smart shoes. Oh, sure... I've got a pair of black Doc Martens and a nice pair of RM Williams Simpson Dress Boots that I wear for work, but I've not got anything really special.

You know, the kind of thing that you might wear with your made-to-measure Savile Row suit at your wedding....

I got a little swatch of the material my suit is being made with through the post the other day. Armed with this, we headed into town yesterday to see if we could find something suitable. The suit is going to be a brown herringbone, so I had in mind a nice pair of classic brogues, or something similar. Nothing too fancy.

What is it with these bloody clown shoes? It appears to be impossible to buy a pair of decent men's shoes that aren't twice the length of your feet and have tips that are raised off the ground at the "toe" and point about 45 degrees up into the sky.

I'm the best part of six foot five inches tall. I have big feet (UK size 12). They're not freakishly big on a man of my size, but they're certainly bigger than average. The last thing I need is a pair of shoes that make my feet look even bigger.

I have visions of owning a pair of shoes that will require me to arrive at my wedding in a collapsible car with a buttonhole that squirts water and a bucket of glitter....

.....Actually, that sounds like kind of fun.

I'm going to have to look in Birmingham, I think.

and so it goes, and so it goes....

---
Cast:

In Nottingham:
The Groom - a tall and rather diffident chap.
The Bride - a rather long-suffering beauty.

Other characters:

In Vienna:
Clemens - the father
Susie - the mother
Susie - the daughter (don't ask - her husband was called Clemens too. Imagine how confusing that was at family parties....)
Peter - the boyfriend

Scene: A living room in Nottingham.

The bride and groom are sitting together on the sofa. The bride is just back from Vienna and is showing the groom the plans for their wedding.

The Groom (reading from a piece of paper): "Arrive in Austria Thursday 7th June. Pickup at Vienna airport by Peter". Will he be driving the blue Nissan.

The Bride: I shouldn't think so. He doesn't work for Nissan anymore. Does it matter?

The Groom (who has no idea what car Peter drives or that he used to work for Nissan): Never mind. Oooh, flower arranging on Friday afternoon?

The Bride (defensively): Yes, me and the girls.

The Groom: How exciting! Does this mean I'm expected to do something with the boys?

The Bride: Well, it might be nice.

The Groom: Right. We'll be going to the pub then....

The Bride: Oh, there's something else I need to tell you.

The Groom (warily): yyyyeeeeesss?

The Bride: Yes. Susie (younger) had a word with me. Apparently Clemens would very much like to give a speech.

The Groom (decisively): We said no speeches....

The Bride: Yes, and Clemens knows that, so he asked Susie to ask me because he doesn't want me to feel as though I can't say no.

The Groom: ... we agreed we were going to keep things simple....

The Bride: Obviously, I feel as though we can't really say no.

The Groom: Right.

The Bride: ....and my dad would very much like to give a speech too.

The Groom: Right.

The Bride: ...and I didn't really feel like I could say no....

The Groom: I see. I suppose not.

The Bride: The thing is....

The Groom: Yes?

The Bride: Well.... if Clemens and my dad both give speeches...

The Groom: Yes?

The Bride: Well, it will be a bit lopsided. All speeches from my side of the family....

The Groom (coldly): I see

The Bride: I was wondering if you could ask your best man...

The Groom: I don't have a best man. We agreed to keep it simple. I've got a witness....

The Bride: Ok. Your witness.

The Groom: I told my witness that he wouldn't have to give a speech. He's in New Zealand until June. I don't think it's fair to ask him to give a speech.

The Bride: OK. But the evening might seem a bit lop-sided...

The Groom: We said no speeches!

The Bride: And I thought we should also have two ushers. One English speaker, one German speaker. I thought perhaps you could ask your brother...

The Groom: ........ !

fade....

----

The only thing that matters to me is the marriage itself. The rest is just detail.

cos every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man...

With a little under nine weeks to go before the wedding, my mind has belatedly turned to what I'm going to be wearing on the big day. A nice suit, perhaps? Not a morning suit or anything poncey like that. Just an honest-to-goodness suit. The kind of suit that I might be able to wear again some day. You can't go wrong with a nice suit, can you? I don't know very much about fashion, but I kind of assumed that a good, designer suit would probably do just fine. I have a decent Ted Baker suit, but I thought that perhaps this was a good opportunity to buy something new and a little less worn. The only problem is that I am a slightly awkward shape for an off-the-peg suit - I'm tall and broad shouldered and skinny. Suits I buy off the peg never quite look quite right: they are either too loose in the trouser department, too short in the leg or too baggy in the jacket.

Ok. Well that's not necessarily a problem either as I could get a suit made to measure. I'd been thinking that perhaps I could get Paul Smith to knock one up for me - he has a big store in Nottingham, and I know he has a bespoke suit service. A quick enquiry at said shop on Friday revealed that not only have I potentially left this a bit late (they need at least 8 weeks), but also that I would have to go to London for three fittings and could expect to pay at least £1900.

Hmmm.

Well, it doesn't have to be a Paul Smith suit, I suppose. The problem is that my knowledge of this industry is minimal, to say the least. Where the hell else should I look for a made to measure suit? Savile Row?

A quick piece of googling led me to the useful information that Gieves and Hawkes, of 1 Savile Row, have an outlet in the Mailbox in Birmingham. I know nothing about them, and I suspect that they are rather from the traditional end of tailoring, but a quick phone call later and I have an appointment to be measured up by them on Sunday this week.

In theory, there's no commitment, but it seemed like a good opportunity to go and have a look at how this kind of thing works and to see if there is anything there that sparks a few ideas.

I'm not stupid though. I know nothing about this kind of thing, so I am carefully taking my fiancée with me... who does. I'm not likely to come away having bought something hideous, but it's probably not a bad idea to have someone with some taste come along with me, eh?

On the off-chance that someone reading this does know something about buying a decent suit... any suggestions?

Frankly I'm all ears.

...and we're off to the jewellers on Saturday too. I'm dreading being asked what I want, as to be honest my only answer is "a ring". I really know nothing more than that. How many types of ring can there be? (don't answer that - I already know there are far more than I care to think about at the moment. The key criteria for me is that it is as indestructible as possible, so it will probably end up being platinum. Beyond that, God only knows).

Every day's a school day.