My wedding memories go up in smoke

For at least half a century, the guiding principle of my life has been thinking: “What could possibly go wrong?”

But my light is clearly dimming now. Because it never occurred to me, until I pitched up for my Trolleybus Driving Experience last week, that it would have a power pedal worked with the left foot. This created something of a challenge as I have driven automatic cars for decades, and come to regard my left leg as a completely useless appendage when behind the wheel.

The result was a certain jerkiness in the ride which I thought might at least have kept my passengers awake and on their toes (or their backs, if they were rash enough to stand up). However, my son managed to sleep soundly in his mother’s arms throughout. Daddy driving a trolleybus seems unlikely to feature strongly in his early memory bank.

Another thing I never foresaw, though it seems obvious with the benefit of hindsight, was the desirability of formulating a watertight Plan B in case a disgruntled bridegroom took it into his head to burn down my wedding venue shortly before the event.

Peckforton Castle ablaze

My fiancée and I originally planned a civil ceremony at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire, part of which went up in smoke at the weekend, but were luckily upgraded to a religious service in the parish church through the spirited and spiritual intervention of Rick, the splendid vicar.

Of course, when we made that arrangement we did not know that Peckforton boasted a trained barn owl that could swoop down to deliver the rings, Harry Potter style, at the high point of the ceremony. If only we could have combined that with the 1662 Prayer Book and three rousing hymns, our happiness would have been truly complete.

As it was on our wedding day, February 2009

As it was, we had a glorious reception in the Drawing Room of the Castle, apparently the seat of Sunday’s fire, and spent our wedding night in the now collapsed bridal suite above. It seems slightly surreal to read that rooms so firmly fixed in our long term memories have simply gone.

The Drawing Room awaiting our wedding guests

We organised our wedding quite quickly – because you cannot hang around at my age – and were only able to hold it at Peckforton owing to a late cancellation. Without such a stroke of luck, it is hard to understand how anyone manages anything other than a long engagement, given that every decent wedding venue is booked up literally years in advance.

Knowing how much work goes into planning, my heart went out to those who must have been panicking about the need to find somewhere else to host their big day, until the glad news came through that, in true Blitz spirit, Peckforton would be keeping calm and carrying on.

Continuing to think positive, those at the wedding party on Saturday all had a night to remember (as they called the original film about the sinking of the Titanic) and no humans or owls were injured in the conflagration. Though with the groom helping police with their enquiries, the honeymoon presumably did not get off to the smoothest possible start.

Apparently it all started with a dispute about the bill. The interesting thing is that I distinctly remember having to pay for our wedding in full six weeks before it happened, so there was not much scope for argument on the day. I assumed that this was standard practice, but am now wondering whether they did an internet search that exposed my long history of broken engagements, and decided that it was not worth taking a chance. Even the bride wondered until the very last minute whether I would actually turn up.

Which pleased me, because it showed that both the hotel and my new wife were following that very sound policy of thinking: “What could possibly go wrong?”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Red mist mars the spring sunshine

When my wife and I got married early in 2009, the vicar presented us with an outsize candle and advised us to light it every time we had a row.

Most observers bet that it would not last until Easter, but in fact it has not been lit once. And now it never will be, because someone foolishly stuck it on a windowsill, where the recent heatwave has melted it into a grotesque lump.

It definitely reminds me of something ... the more than faintly obscene remains of our row candle after someone (who shall remain nameless, but we all know who it is) left it standing in the sun

A taste of the somewhat unconventional ceremony where the candle was handed over

I eagerly awaited my wife’s return from her “hen weekend” so that we could discuss this, in line with the strict blame culture applied in the Hann household. But luckily we still failed to have a row, even when my hopes of a goodly supply of eggs were cruelly dashed. Wrong sort of “hen weekend”, apparently.


It says much for Mrs Hann’s saintly nature that we manage to live so peaceably when I am in a permanent state of badly suppressed fury. On Friday I was angry because I spent five ghastly hours driving to a dinner where no one wanted to speak to me.

While on Thursday, the red mist rose because I had exactly the opposite experience of not being ignored while simply trying to pick up a prescription from my local pharmacy.

To my amazement, I was ushered into a consulting room with the pharmacist and invited to take a seat to discuss my medication. I demurred, being on a tight schedule for lunch in Newcastle, but naturally asked what it was all about.

And the answer was that “rather than simply handing the drugs over, we now like to make sure that our customers know why they have been prescribed them and how to take them.”

I wondered whether I looked like a man who would not know the difference between a pill and a suppository. My doctor prescribed the tablets, so why would I want supplementary advice from a pharmacist? Is this a ploy to fill the 95% of their time that must have been saved by medics prescribing by computer, rather than in an illegible scrawl?

And where will this sort of thing end? Will I be called into a consulting room with my butcher so that he can tell me how the pig felt about being made into sausages, what they are likely to do to my arteries, and how best to cook them?

If the practice spreads to off-licences, I will need to write off half a day every time I want to buy a bottle of Scotch.

So I fixed the chemist with one of my withering looks, informed him that I could read, and flounced off.

It served me right when I got home and read the thousand-word leaflet with the heart medication three times without being able to fathom whether I was supposed to take it in the morning or evening, and with or without food. But since the manufacturer did not think to mention this among all the guff about possible side-effects, most of which I am currently suffering, it seems reasonable to assume that it does not matter.

Then I took my pristine car for a service at my local garage, and it returned with a large, ugly chip out of the driver’s door, which apparently they can produce hours of CCTV footage to prove was not their fault. The red mist was positively billowing by this stage.

So that is two local businesses I probably won’t be using again. Slowly but surely the horizons of the irascible narrow. I would go on an anger management course but it would almost certainly give me another heart attack.

There is clearly no point buying a replacement row candle that we never light, so I am going to try ordering an anger candle instead. No, on second thoughts, make that a gross.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.