423: Dean Gaffney

Stood outside a bar in Manchester, in the straddling group of smokers taking a break from the wedding reception dancing, Dean Gaffney, the weird-looking lad with the dog from Eastenders, walked through our crowd and tried to go into the bar. The sign on the door informed him, and the wee bird on his arm, that it was closed to him -the public- for a private function. He trailed away with a disgruntled look, and my friend shouted down the street after him Robbie, Robbie, we've got the same name, Robbie. Also in the group was the comedian Tim Key and world famous members of the legendary hip hop supergroups Surreal Knowledge, Tactical Thinking and now Modern Medicine. It was like being in Hollywood or something, what with all these glittering stars, gathered together to celebrate the happy occasion: Congratulations to Ian and Nicola.

It's the wedding season in this world. One on Sunday, followed by my first experience of an Irish wedding on Thursday, as I visit Belfast to make preparations for my own Irish wedding. Hollywood can take a walk, and I'll calm myself with music and reading Captain Beefheart, The Biography by Mike Barnes (you know Mike, Mike Barnes. He's the guy who wrote Captain Beefheart, The Biography. It's a book, a biography, about a man called Don Vliet, calling himself Don Van Vliet, calling himself Captain Beefheart. I guess he's a singer.. of sorts. Yes that Mike Barnes.) and getting all excited about the descriptions of the guitar tangles that make up Trout Mask Replica (which isn't on spotify, damn you). Also being in Ireland it'd be a shame not to drink Guinness and whiskey, and yesterday I ate Irish lamb liver and champ, and enjoy some old time Irish good times, fiddling and crack n that. And a bit of traditional blog catch-up in this quite moment of hanging over.

So Dean Gaffney wandered off disappointed and when the mild surprise and mirth abated we took to the dance floor with cheese and crackers and Room's wildly inflated drinks prices, and gave praise to Eros and Cupid and Bacchus and the muses with our shifting and thrown shapes and shambolic sidling. Sorry you missed it Dean, but it was a good laugh, and a very happy occasion. They're good, aren't they, these happy occasions? I think more would be a good thing, what a revolutionary thought. You thought they should be rationed or even stripped from our timetable, but -no- I have a better idea. Let's get married. Drink and be drunk. Eat and be comfortable.

So, a wise, and newly-married man, gave good advice along the lines of: To anyone getting married soon, don't be nervous; it will be the best day of your life. Here here! Hear hear! (Hare here hare.) And I'll try my best to remember that as I'm picking suits, and preparing speeches and doing things that I don't even know need doing (waxing my elbows, braiding my shoes, and saddling my third cousin's dog). A grand day out that beats a trip to the moon into a cocked hat. Now I just have to work out how I can convince everyone that this should be our first dance (it is the catchiest most melodious song on the album, at least):

281: In which I temporarily become a Royalist

“Checkmate Kate, you’ve taken the king” - banner being waved in the crowd

Pundits talked worriedly about our cynical age, or lack of deference and respect for tradition, and regular readers of this blog may consider me a cynic.  I consider myself to be a sceptical optimist, but that’s another matter entirely.  The point I’m working towards, is that I have thoroughly enjoyed this whole Royal wedding from start to finish.  As I write now we are waiting for the couple to make their balcony appearance.  I suspect that had I followed any of the media hype leading up to today, I would have been bored shitless of the whole thing weeks ago.  Fortunately it all passed me by and today has been the first point in which I have paid it any attention.

Charles and Diana were married the same year as my parents; William was born just a few months after me; and now William marries the love he met at university as I make preparations to marry my university love.  We are like proper bros (as in “...before hoes”, not the highly respected groundbreaking pop band).

Now as I continue this post, a day has passed and I can look back on the events of yesterday separated from the emotional involvement.  The scale of the whole wasteful, mass-fawning swept me up with the excitement and the emotion.  The Royal family became human; not untouchable deities, or posh unwanted arseholes.  Charles was the proud dad and the Queen was everyone’s grandmother.  Everyone was wearing bizarre multicoloured and oddly accessorised clothing.  A Lancaster bomber flies overhead flanked by a Spitfire and a Hurricane Hawk.  Pundits tediously wibbled on and on about peoples clothes, instead of telling us who the guests were and why they were there.  The Beckhams...wtf?  The maid of honour was distracting in a low cut dress.  The bride and groom looked nervous and happy; you know, like actual human people... amazing.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the Royal habit of not having surnames like us commoners.  Windsor is not the family's surname; it is the House name, and has been since 1917 when George V changed it from the too German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.   We learned that William’s full name is William Arthur Phillip Louis, and his wedding present from his little ol’ granny was the titles Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn, and Barron Carrickfergus.  Kate is no longer a Middleton; her full name is now simply Katherine Elizabeth, Duchess of Cambridge.  She joins the House of Windsor, but due to not being a blood relative of Prince Phillip, she is not a member of the much more excitingly named House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

I can now look back on yesterday, slightly confused as to how excited I was by it all.  I felt strange new feelings of national pride, jingoism, flag-waving, communal mania... now there is an almost unpleasant hangover lull.  It was the wedding of people I don’t know, suspect I wouldn’t have anything in common with; people who probably wouldn’t cross a courtyard to pour champagne on me.  It was fun while it lasted, just stay away from The Mail.  Not because it will be full of the wedding for the next million years, just as a general rule of thumb; stay away from The Mail.

By the way, the couple looked very happy; best of luck to them.

275: bank holiday stress; need a few days at work for a rest

These long bank holiday weekends are tiring things.  Four days of socialising, drinking effectively non-stop, eating nothing except spiced meat, potatoes and gravy, burning in the sun; and all that after two days of exhibition openings, burning in the sun; and all that after two days of exhibition openings.  I’ve just slept through Singing in the Rain, for about the twentieth time.  I see the start, I see the end, but all the stuff in the middle is a mystery, like what they put in hotdogs.  I must warn you now that I am extremely sleepy and have prepared no theme for today.  So no interesting article, no amusing rant, no... None of the rest of it.  So if you want to bail out now, don’t be embarrassed; I won’t be annoyed.  There are other things for you to read.

David Icke's totally plausible theory 

Three days back at work, for a nice rest, followed by another exhausting bank holiday.  There’s the bloody royal wedding, which I’m not invited to.  William is the same age as me yet looks about ten years older.  You’d think with all his money and clandestine lizard power he’d be able to get some stem cells injected into his face.  Perhaps he has and their main effect is to keep him in vaguely human form.  Or it may be that generations of inbreeding can make people go old and bald before their time.  The cost of one of their fancy-schmancy embroidered wedding napkins would pay for my entire wedding, plus the honeymoon, a large house, and all the food, holidays, and education to raise five children into adulthood; it’s a scandal.

I struggle to comprehend the fawning, cap-doffing, merchandise-buying obsession with the royal wedding.  No idea where it has come from or what purpose it serves.  99% of our lives no one gives a shit about them.  There was an embarrassing public howl of hysterical, self-pitying bleating when Diana popped off this mortal coil.  There is absolutely no interest what-so-ever in the Queen’s speech on Christmas day; in 29 years I haven’t seen it once, and I suspect there is a fair to middling chance that neither have you. 

Phillip and Camilla even moved the day of their wedding so the television coverage wouldn’t clash with Pope John Paul II’s funeral; this is bizarre beyond belief.  The British monarchy is an inherently anti-Catholic institution, and the Pope is a twisted little nobody.  The only reason for the change in scheduling can be a desperate admission that our own royal family rank so low in our minds that we’d rather glimpse at a picture of a box containing the corpse of an over-privileged bigot.  The next step is rescheduling a royal wedding so as not to clash with a particularly gripping episode of Coronation Street.

Anyway, good luck to them, but you know, stop making so much noise about it.  They are just people, and the only real privilege they deserve is to be first in line for the guillotine.

I never meant to end this post with a call for bloody anti-monarchist revolution, and I didn't.  It was a funny joke.

213: codenames and wheelbarrows

Most of this weekend passed, I spent at my friends’ house eating their delicious food and playing with their 9 month old son, my godson.  My fiancée was away in Belfast planning the wedding; trying on dresses, worrying about money, and visiting hotels and wedding fairs.  Rather than sit at home playing computer games and procrastinating, I hightailed it to the friends’ where we could talk about music, politics, parenting, family, weddings (!), and the like.  It’s seemed like it had been a while since I saw my godson, but in reality it was only a few days.  Usually my fiancée takes over and I don’t get a chance to play with him.  So this was a good opportunity to teach him how to wave bye-bye and help him practice walking by holding his hands while he toddles and stumbles bravely around the living room.

I think it’s important to not start naming names and discussing other people’s lives and stuff in this blog, which is why I keep having to use phrases like ‘my fiancée’.  I’m not repeating this over and over just to show off in some pathetic little way.  Maybe I should come up with code names for all the people I mention.  ‘My fiancée’ could be replaced with ‘Codename F’, and the wedding could be renamed ‘Operation: Bankruptcy’.  That might get complicated for everyone if I have to start remembering codes, and I might become obsessed and start using them in real life.  That way madness lies, I think.  Best if I stay away.

Our wedding

Now it is a fact that I seem to have got behind with my blogging, and missed a day out in the last week.  I’m not sure how this has happened but off the top of my head I think I missed Sunday out.  Maybe more; I’ll have to double check.  But I am definitely playing catch-up, so this post is standing in for Monday’s, and then I’ll have to rattle out something for today (Tuesday).  I’ll try and make it about something.  I’m applying for copywriter jobs (I’d be brilliant at that!) so maybe something related; I don’t know. 

I’ve been struggling with Richard Dawkins’ The Extended Phenotype, which I had high hopes for but am finding quiet tedious.  The Ancestors Tale, The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker were all brilliant; fascinating and lucid.  But Extended Phenotype just seems like a tedious essay or paper with thousands of references to other writers and their work in every sentence.  This is disappointing because I have read somewhere that Dawkins considers it his most important contribution to the field.  Once I get my head around it, or break through the crap to get to the good stuff. I may be able to write a bit about it.

The workmen from the council are at this moment unloading a load of scaffold poles in the garden and beginning the process of building platforms up the side of the house so they can look in our windows, and use our toilet by peeing in through the window.  The council are re-cladding the exteriors of all the houses on the estate, and I think they’ll be on the roof messing with the tiles and chimney stack.  My flat is the tops storey of a two storey semi-detached, and any minute now I will glance over my shoulder to see a big bloke in high-vis’ jacket and hard hat staring in at me through the window.  The next six weeks will be spent being woken up by hammering on the walls at 8am and keeping the curtains closed so I can scratch my arse and pick my nose in private.

I hope they are going to tarmac the driveway, because this morning I woke up to see the paving slabs being ripped up and thrown willy-nilly on the lawn.  Then for good luck the gates were smashed up a bit and a little mobile digger was brought along to mangle the gateposts into crushed concrete and twisted re-bars.  Any day now I’m expecting to be cut in two length ways by a falling roof slate, or to be disrupted from my evening meal by a wheelbarrow crashing through the ceiling.  At the moment there is soil were the drive should be.  I might run out and plant rows of onions and potatoes before they make it back with the tarmac.  

164: speech speech speech

Engaged for less than a week and already scratching my head and sweating from my arse over the speech I will have to give.  To an audience comprising 99.99% drunk Irish in-laws and 0.01% my family and friends I’ll be required to wittily present platitudes, thanks and toasts.  There is a likelihood of it going one of two ways.  Either I’ll get a lump in my throat and struggle to speak holding back confused tears, or in an attempt to open my heart I’ll come across as a sarcastic little prick.  Failing that I could resort to nervously mumbling at my feet as my drunken eyes struggle to focus on the spinning room and the increasingly incomprehensible notes and accents.

Isn’t it great that I can be so positive about it?  This is a cleansing process (I’ll keep telling myself) and once I’ve worried a bit I can get on with the real stuff – choosing a best man, bashing out a speech, saving some money, trying on suits, weighing up the benefits of a top hat.  This seems to be a pretty complex venture, and my fiancée is already wading knee-deep through wedding shoes and bridesmaid’s dresses.  With the help of her sisters and ma this wedding will be planned with military precision.  I expect folders will be compiled and magazines will be bought; samples will be collected and venues will be visited.  I suspect she is even planning on buying a special wedding laptop specifically for using for whatever it is that might need doing.

The whole concept of this being a New Year with a capital NY is still saturating all around and as a result I’m considering getting up early tomorrow to get an invigorating stroll under my belt.  Then back home for a bite to eat, some spring cleaning, a spot of writing, before popping a homemade toad-in-the-hole in the oven and after eating getting an early night.  Start the year sensibly, as one means to go on, and with a healthy recuperative attitude to the excesses of the Christmas and New Year period.  Better get to sleep.  Erm... I think I’ve finished writing.  I certainly feel that I’ve run out of things to say tonight.  So... er... bye then.  Be seeing you...

158: drooling, impulsive and bump on the head

Thank the little baby Jesus fucking Christ I don’t have Sky at home.  I’ve been happily engaged to be married to my true love for a little over two days, and already I’m choked to the eyeballs on wedding television.  There are actually entire channels (yes plural) devoted to programmes about two people saying ‘I do’ in endlessly slight variations of the same event.  Everyone thinks their wedding is unique and special, and to them it is, but to anyone looking at the sky they are all the same.  It’s like the so-called races of humanity: all have minor superficial differences, but remember to focus on more important things and under the surface the genetic differences are amazingly insignificant.

Seemingly, as with weddings.  Some people get married in a building, some in a slightly different kind of building, others not in a building but near a building or in a temporary structure.  Some people exchange small rings of precious metal which they wear as ornamentation on their left hand; actually they all do that.  Some women wear a long white dress; some wear a slightly shorter ivory coloured dress.  For some entirely inexplicable reason, possibly to do with a childhood bump on the head, some people choose to have their wedding filmed for a low budget TV show, and have arbitrary restrictions put on the planning of their special day. 

Filling my soon-to-be in-laws Sky+ box is a programme called Don’t Tell The Bride in which the bride is kept alone and isolated for the month before her wedding and the groom is given £12,000 and told to sort the whole fucking lot out by himself.  Mostly they give it a good shot but inevitably, being the drooling impulsive cock-lead button-pushing obsessive tit-watchers that we all are, they have at least one fit of mania.  Like trying to design the dress by themselves, or moving the best man into the house and imbibing nothing but beer and Dominos for a month, or gambling most of the money away, or buying expensive plane tickets to Las Vegas and using the last bag of pennies to pay for the rest of the wedding.  Some of these ideas are not so disastrous, but others can and do fry the brains of their poor wing-clipped brides.

Now I am engaged I am duty bound to sit still and shut up while women I barely know attempt to enforce random traditions that they can only explain with the words ‘that’s the way it always is’.  Apparently wedding invitations are supposed to be sent out by and from the bride’s parents, not actually saying the names of the wedding couple on them.  Well not on my watch.  This clearly makes no sense and simple tradition cannot be used to justify or explain something that clumsy and unnecessary.  In many parts of the world it’s tradition to mutilate the genitals of baby girls, but somehow tradition cannot adequately justify this abomination.  The point I just failed to make there, with that ugly, unnecessary and imbalanced image was just that tradition is not a good enough reason to do something.  If a tradition is harmless and fun it might be nice to do it, but if you can think of a better way to do it, do it your own way.  Other times traditions might be actively annoying, stupid or harmful in which case it might be a good idea to give it a miss.

And we haven’t even started with the debacle of explaining our secular wedding to my fiancée’s elderly Irish Catholic relatives yet...