HeadSpill

Weddings are scary. I went see good friend commit to the holy (and legally binding) union last weekend, it was quite lovely, and even emotional in places. Yet as much as it was wonderful to catch up with old mates you rarely see outside of such event all together, getting pissed and telling everyone you love them, I still find the wedding ceremony itself to be an utterly terrifying proposition.

I’ve been to four weddings in the last 10 years, a big church do, a civil ceremony in a castle, a town hall event, and a small civic centre registry office where the pen for the ledger was on a chain not unlike in a bank.

It’s just certain things give me the shivers, the way older married woman look on at the bride while she walks down the aisle with a mixture of dewy eyed reminiscence, jealousy and judgement, either giving their own silent seal of approval on the event or taking bets on how long before the loving couple will have a messy break up.

I’m not knocking marriage. Happy married couples make happy parents that beget happy children, and god knows we need more them. The ability to communicate and articulate your needs and requirements as an individual, while at the same time considering the needs and requirements of your love buddy is a skill that requires more than my current nieve technique of a simple venn diagram in my head, one region labelled ‘emotions’ and another labelled ‘common sense’, with an intersecting region consisting of a fuzzy green cloud that looks slightly like william shatners face.

I’m sure being married is great, if it’s the kind of thing you want to do. As a brief insight into my life, at the age of 32 I’m only just beginning to embark on a serious relationship with a person of the opposite sex (my preference, she’s ‘technically’ my second girlfriend, my first being an unconscious beta test).

You can either look at this as failure to ‘play the game’ earlier in life or an attempt to hold onto freedom and independence as long as possible, depending on your nesting instinct. Personally my excuse is that it’s something I never quite got around to, until now, but then I said that about growing a beard too.

At the recent wedding, it occurred to me that by having a girlfriend to whom I feel er…’serious’ I have put myself incrementally closer to all manner of terrifyingly grown up stuff which encompasses said event. It came upon as I was caught in a wave of cynicism watching a close friend sign his name in the marital registrar, wondering whether he’d written his own name or simply the words ‘I am happy now’ as the gathered crowds took photos as evidence.

As well as wedding bells, this weekend was also an opportunity for my girlfriend to meet my parents, not something I’d ever done before, and not for the wanting of cheapening my life by likening it to a pitch for a tv show, it was “Quantum Leap meets Sorry”, where Timothy Lumsden is blasted into the future instead of the past and has to work out how he came to be happy by studying photos of a half forgotten unpleasant childhood. Nice.

Oh dear. I’ve exceed my quota of sentences that begin with the words “my girlfriend and me….”. I currently find that I’m able to take any subject at all and in the space of a single conversation refer everything back to some tiny moment I have experienced recently with her that has no relevance to the subject at hand. How ‘coupley’. Still, at least I’m not one of the utterly besotted sort you see snogging in from of the milk aisle when your trying to do your bloody shopping.

Oh smeg.

I casually dropped the word ‘multitudinous’ into conversation last night. I’m quite pleased.

Big words, and the use thereof. It’s somthing I bang on about every now and then, there’s just not enough people making full use of the English language anymore. I remember once waiting outside a metro station in newcastle when someone came up and asked If I knew where the biscuit factory was, (an art gallery build on the site of an old bakery,) and what the nearest metro station stop to it would be. I named two stations saying the venue in question was ‘equidistant’ to them. The initial look I got was one of puzzlement, like I’d said something that was nonsense or delibrately confusing, but then a smile cracked right across her face and she repeated the word back to me, ‘equidistant!’, taking pleasure from the use of the word.

I was pleased she smiled, because in the few short moments beforehand, when she was looking at me curiously, like i’d just been beamed down from another planet, my brain begangearing up for a defensive response for an “eh?” or “you what?”, to which I like to think my retort would have been somthing like ‘if you don’t know what it means then I’ll give you themetro fare, you need all the education you can get’, but probably wouldn’t.

The full English langange, like the breakfast, is a rich and cultured affair, if you can use a big

word, do it.

Other stuff.
My sweet girlfriend took me to Colwyn Castle in Wales. Lovely. However as I was walking around I couldn’t trying to compare it to the castle in the game ‘Oblivion’ which I’ve been playing recently. oh dear.