ON WEDDINGS

Marriage, sometimes

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Sometimes he’ll accidentally throw a loo roll down the toilet and she won’t understand what…how did you… they’re so expens…just pop it in the bin.

Sometimes, a couple of days later, she’ll hurl a sock in the toilet instead of the laundry basket, and they’ll call it even.

Sometimes she’ll break her ‘no food in the bedroom’ rule and devour a whole bag of Maltesers on top of the duvet.

Sometimes he’ll find the empty red packet on the floor and resist the temptation to start a discussion about double standards.

Sometimes he’ll go out drinking so much ahead of her 30th birthday that he has to leave her party early to go home and nurse his aching throat.

Sometimes she’ll keep partying, force him out of bed at 3am to let her in the house, and they’ll call that even too.

Sometimes he’ll buy her a new fancy laptop to prove how much he believes in her writing (and to make her weekly exclamations of MY F***ING LAPTOP IS RUINING MY LIFE stop).

Sometimes she’ll cry when she remembers that he did that.

Sometimes she’ll fall asleep on the sofa until 4 o’clock in the morning, after promising she would go to bed in a minute.

Sometimes he’ll come downstairs to get her, and decide not to let the tirade of abuse that comes when he disturbs her hurt his feelings.

Sometimes she’ll get sunstroke, or food poisoning, or eat something that’s too ‘wheaty’ and turn into a quivering, vomiting, moany mess.

Sometimes he’ll use a VERY FIRM tone to tell her that if she doesn’t drink all of the water she needs to rehydrate then she’ll have to go to hospital (and then explain later that that’s just what he sounds like when he’s scared).

Sometimes he’ll show her a clip of a big kick or some good running that a rugby person did.

Sometimes she’ll make the right face to make him believe that she knows why she should be impressed.

Sometimes she’ll manage to figure out the answer to the 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown numbers game within the assigned 30 second period.

Sometimes he’ll look at her like she’s the cleverest person in the world.

Sometimes he’ll suggest going out for sushi instead of cooking food at home.

Sometimes she’ll think – this right here is exactly why I married you.

Sometimes he’ll look at her, panicked and say “I am in no way prepared for our anniversary tomorrow. I’m going into town and may be gone for some time.”

Sometimes she’ll look at him and think – it doesn’t matter. I’d still choose you.

Every single time.

When dear friends get married: Why I always cry at weddings

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When you get to our age, you find yourself going to a lot of weddings.

It’s how people in their late twenties/early thirties spend their weekends – we go to weddings, we go to hen and stag dos and we have conversations about how much worse our hangovers are now that we’re old. We’re a lot of fun.

And it’s very easy to feel cynical about all these nuptials. Weddings are tiring, our feet weren’t made for wearing high heels for 12 hours straight (particularly the boys), and our stomachs takes days to forgive us for eating our meals at funny times of the day.

But that stuff is all just logistics. The real reason we go to weddings is well worth getting a few blisters and a confused tummy for.

I’ve seen lots of my friends get married now. Real, dear, close chums with whom I’ve shared various periods of my life – school, university, jobs, that time when I learnt that I don’t get on with Sambuca… We’ve grown up together, one way or another, so when one of us gets married, it feels like a big day for all of us.

There’s not much else that we get to see our friends commit to that is so significant (though the pals who witnessed my ‘let’s wear nothing but fuchsia pink!’ phase might feel differently) so being there to witness it is a real privilege.

And for me, seeing a close friend walk down the aisle to marry the person with whom they’ll spend the rest of their life is enough to bring not just a tear but a flood to my eyes. While lots of people express joy through smiling, I do it by turning my face into a waterfall. I’ve tried not to do it, to think of all the make-up I piled on just moments before and hold it together, but I fail every time.

And if my friend getting married cries too then I might as well just call it a day and go to bed – I’m such a mess by the time they’re pronounced husband and wife that you’d think I’d been watching The Notebook. Whilst newborn babies manage to behave beautifully throughout the ceremony, it is me who needs to be carried out and wiped down.

But I actually think it’s a good thing. However you express pride in your friends, whether through tears, grins or high fives, it’s good to show it. One of the best things about being an adult is being able to look back on the times we’ve spent with our chums – the nights in eating cheese, the nights out dancing to cheese – and feel utterly amazed that somehow we’re suddenly grown up enough to do something as serious as getting married. The fact that one of our parents hasn’t stepped in to tell us to stop showing off and calm down still amazes me.

For all the panda eyes and weeping and resulting dehydration, weddings remain one of the best ways to spend a weekend. Seeing a friend looking happier than they ever have before (with the small exception of that time the DJ played a Five vs Blue megamix on their hen do – good luck beating that, hubby!) is just about as good as it gets.

And whether you’re likely to cry during the ceremony or not, I still recommend taking a packet of tissues with you to a wedding. At our age, the hangover you get the following morning is enough to make anybody sob.

How’s married life? Exactly the same.

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Charlotte and Leon 2013_ Ceremony Photograph _68Aside from “When are you going to have a baby?”, “Are you pregnant yet?” and “Will you name your firstborn after me?”, “How’s married life?” is the question I get asked most frequently.

I don’t know what people think will happen when you get married but, in my case at least, it hasn’t changed anything at all. Sure, I got a new surname and now spend most of the day trying to remember what I’m called, and I had a ring put on my finger that has to stay there forever or the world with explode (or something like that) but otherwise things are just as they were before.

But that’s a good thing. And here’s why:

1. That’s why you got married in the first place
Getting married means: I want to be with you as I know you for the rest of my life. It doesn’t mean: marry me and then immediately change into somebody else to help keep things interesting. The fact that you get to spend your life with somebody exactly as you find them (with perhaps just a few small wardrobe improvements) is one of the main reasons marriage is so popular. There’s that, the fact that you no longer have to pretend to like nightclubs, and knowing that there will always be someone there to help you take the bin out.

2. You’ll face enough change together as it is 
Life is full of surprises – some of them good, such as the release of Cadbury’s Pebbles (have you tried them? They’re delicious) and some of them bad, like when Coronation Street gets cancelled because of sport. But that’s OK because whatever comes up, you’ll take it on as a duo, so the least you can do is remain the one consistent thing in each other’s lives. If you got married, changed into different people and then ITV altered its television schedule, do you really think you could handle it?

3. If you were going to change you’d have done it by now  
Remember all those hours you put in at the start of the relationship? The showers, the shaving, the pretending to be up for watching Transformers when you’d have preferred to just stare at the cinema ticket for two hours instead? Couldn’t keep that up for too long, could you? No, after a few months you settled into being real people – with opinions that differ! And bad habits you refuse to change! Like his inexplicable love for leaving boxer shorts in the middle of the bathroom floor Every. Single. Morning! And if you thought marriage was going to change any of that, I’m afraid that you were mistaken. Marriage changes nothing, it just means there will be somebody there to comment on all of your faults for the rest of your life.

4. It’s OK that you don‘t have any news 
You have to accept that from the moment you said ‘I do’, you became the least interesting people in the world. Whilst the engagement is all “Oh my god!” and “How did he do it?!” and “How many strippers do you want on your hen do?”, your marriage will only spark a reaction if you co-create a human or start asking your friends to put their keys in a bowl when they arrive at your house for a dinner party. So it’s best to just take advantage of those first few months – sit back, relax and enjoy being out of the limelight. And if the only news you have to share is that you’ve started watching Modern Family or that you’ve discovered that ten is the optimum number of marshmallows to have with a hot chocolate, then so be it.

So if you want to have an interesting conversation with a newly-wed, don’t ask them what married life’s like, ask them what’s good on telly at the moment or what snacks they can recommend – they’ll have so much more to say. And if you think you can see a bump forming around her middle, I recommend checking the bin for sweet wrappers before putting yourself forward as a namesake.

What a bride is really thinking two weeks before her wedding

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IMG_27461. Is it ok to watch TV when you get back to your hotel room on your wedding night?

2. I wonder if I can get away with putting a label that says ‘Don’t eat any of the red ones’ on the sweets table.

3. Will I have time to watch the Coronation Street omnibus while I’m getting ready?

4. The honeymoon will be the perfect opportunity to grow my over-plucked eyebrows back.

5. If only you could legitimately put DVD box sets on a wedding list.

6. I’m so glad I didn’t get a wedding dress that meant I had to reduce my cheese consumption.

7. I can’t wait to let the power that comes with wearing a wedding dress go straight to my head.

8. I hope nobody tries to make friends with us on our honeymoon.

9. Bank balance-wise, eloping would have been a much better choice.

10. The plus-side to the wedding being over is that I’ll have more ambitious things on my to-do list than ‘Find tongs small enough to pick a marshmallow out of a jar’.

11. Having so much time off emptying the dishwasher should not be the most exciting thing about going on a honeymoon. And yet it is.

Honeymoon booking: The curse of the online review

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IMG_2897We’re planning our honeymoon.

With the trials and tribulations of deciding how many sausages to allocate each guest at the wedding day barbecue, and which hairdresser is resilient enough to take on my mane, the promise of a massive holiday is doing wonders for morale.

We’re going to Bali. It’s very far away, so any unpaid wedding suppliers will have to really want their cash to travel for 17 hours to get it; it promises to be sunny, otherwise I’ll demand my money back; and, as far as I know, the Northern Line doesn’t run that far, and I could really do with a break from it.

Now that we’ve booked the flights, we need to choose where to stay. And, thanks to the internet, we can peruse every hotel, beach and bathroom Bali has to offer from the comfort of our lounge. But, like it or not, we can also see what every joker with an internet connection has to say about it.

Most of the time, reviews are very useful. I want to hear from real people whether a hotel’s sheets were clean and the doors were on their hinges, or if they would sooner sleep under a bridge than stay there again, but there are some details that should be left on the plane.

And so, I’ve put together a list of questions wannabe reviewers should ask themselves before they start typing, to save future holidaymakers some time…

1) Have you actually stayed at the hotel in question?
Now, one would assume this was an obvious requirement but apparently not. When investigating why a hotel we were considering was deemed ‘terrible’ by a reviewer, we discovered it was because they had ‘popped in for an evening drink and been very disappointed with the fruit cocktails which did not contain anywhere near enough tequila!’ Firstly, unless you checked in and spent a night there, I don’t want to hear from you. And secondly, maybe just ask for a bit more Tequila…?

2) Did you check a map before you booked?
You have nobody but yourself to blame if you are disappointed at the proximity of your hotel to the sights. Yes, I know you should be able to trust the words the hotel (whose main aim in life is to get your cash) wrote on their website, but if you didn’t take a millisecond to google the place and do a bit of measuring, then you deserve to be a 15 minute walk from the beach (instead of the advertised seven).

3) Would you have preferred to spend your holiday at home?
It seems that some people just go on holiday to be frustrated at how much harder it is to live their lives exactly as they do at home, abroad.
“The selection of TV channels was ludicrous! There was only news and foreign programmes I couldn’t understand!”
“It took 10 MINUTES to log onto the hotel Wi-Fi. Margaret and I were spitting feathers!”
One would hope that having paid to fly to the other side of the world, you could find something better to do than tweet your disappointment at not being able to watch QI repeats on Dave, but if not, I’m not sure it’s grounds for a one star rating.
If you’re on a business trip then I understand – you need your screens – but otherwise a couple of weeks without the internet will be good for you. Especially if you’re just going to use it to write a review about how long it took you to log on.

4) Did you converse with any human beings?
I appreciate that if the mattress was made of glass, the food saw you bedridden for three days, or the receptionist told you to bugger off on arrival, then a bad review is justified. But if you just didn’t bother to speak up when simple things that could have been resolved annoyed you, just so that you could write a bitchin’ review when you got home, I don’t want to hear about it. Yes, it is frustrating when hotels don’t telepathically work out that you’d like a second towel for your sun lounger, or that your toilet roll has run out in the middle of the night, but if they’ve got a nice pool, are near the sea, and have a healthy approach to cleanliness, I’m probably still going to consider staying there.

And so, after we’d filtered through the good, the bad and the shouldn’t-ever-be-allowed-near-a-computer-again of the online review world, we made a selection. For the first five nights of our trip, we will be staying in a hotel that, according to TripAdvisor, 664 people think is Excellent/Very good, and that 39 people think is Terrible/Poor.

I can only hope that the majority is right. Otherwise, the internet will be hearing from me.

Wedding dilemmas: The guest list

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IMG_2901They say it’s the hardest part of any wedding. And they’re right.

I thought the dress would be difficult. Finding an item in which you look so incredible people gasp for air in your presence sounds tough. But it turns out that anyone will look nice in a wedding dress. Even someone who still has a skin condition only babies get 27 YEARS after they were born.

And finding a venue was easier than I thought too. They have food and tables and are willing to serve you booze until the early hours of the morning. What’s not to like?

But the guest list is tricky. It’s sensitive, it’s complicated and – above all else – it determines whether you’ll be so strapped for cash after the honeymoon that you have to eat your wedding cards to survive.

So how do you choose who to invite? There’s a lot of advice around about what justifies an invitation to a wedding: how long you’ve been friends, how close you are, the likelihood that they’ll buy you that Cath Kidston rolling pin you’ve had your eye on… but very little on how to rule people out. So here’s a check list to help slim down those numbers:

1) Do they get dangerously over-excited in the presence of food and booze?
It’s customary for guests to be given some kind of meal and beverage at a wedding. And if black or deep red were the colours brides wore then this may not be a problem, but white and cream are much less forgiving. One ketchupy paw here, another gravy soaked cheek there and all of a sudden your couture looks like a mucky tea towel. So choosing guests who don’t need hosing down after dinner is advisable.

2) Will they think it’s funny to shout out mid-ceremony?
When I’m standing at the altar and the shit is about to get real, I can’t imagine I’ll be in the mood for jokes. As entertaining as it is when somebody bursts in during a soap opera wedding at the ‘Does anybody have any reason why these two mugs should not be married?’ moment, I don’t think it would be so funny in real life. So if you’ve got a friend whose pursuit of laughs is likely to outweigh their fear of being punched in the face with a bouquet, maybe leave them off the list.

3) Would your fiancé be better off marrying them?
The groom’s final chance to make a run for it before the ball and chain is attached comes when he’s arrived at the venue and is watching the guests arrive. So be careful not to invite anyone who might make him think he’s made the wrong choice. For example, my other half likes festivals and camping and generally being sociable outdoors. I, on the other hand, don’t even like watching festival coverage on TV because all the mud makes me angry. So I won’t be inviting any women with a penchant for portaloos lest he realises at the last minute what he’s missing. Best to opt for your most offensive acquaintances to make sure you stand out as the best option.

4) Will they notice if the registrar’s eyes don’t match the centre pieces?
As a couple for whom it took more than 12 months to change the light bulb in our bedroom, I think it’s unlikely that we will be organised enough to ensure every detail of our wedding is perfect. And that’s fine as long as nobody mentions how much of a shame it is that the wedding vows are not written in the same font as the invitations, or that the sausages on the barbecue are not the exact pink of the flowers. So I recommend crossing off any perfectionists you know and prioritising your less observant friends and relatives – they won’t notice if the wedding car banner actually says ‘Just Barried’.

5) Can they dance?
The best thing about wedding receptions is that everyone lets their hair down and dances like idiots until their feet can take no more. And just as good singers are not welcome at karaoke, good dancers have no place at weddings. I want air punching and hip thrusting and the occasional robot. So if you’re as dangerous as I am on the dance floor, leave anybody with rhythm or co-ordination at home, they’ll just make you look bad.

So there you have it. It’s a cut throat approach but at least it’ll prevent you having to spend your big day in a marquee the size of Wales.

Or if you choose to opt out then just make sure you buy some honey. Card can be ever so tasteless on its own.