Weddings

 This morning, on the the 30th Anniversary of my wedding to the Long Suffering Husband, the news is full of Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds upcoming wedding. 

A cynical person might suggest that this news is a distraction. Carefully placed because the government have been busy trying to pretend that their initial policy for dealing with Coronavirus wasn’t their policy, even though everyone knows it was. Our memories aren’t that short or our ears that dysfunctional. We all heard them say ‘herd immunity’ several times. It might not have been wrong (although probably China and Italy could have given them a clue) but it was and they had to change their minds. I think it’s alright to misunderstand. We learn from our mistakes but if we pretend we didn’t make the error in the first place we can never improve. We are not even distracted enough by Dominic Cummings 58 thread tweet on the subject. The problem with people who think they are geniuses is that they just can’t summarise. Actually, I have read the tweets and I think it boils down to, “I was there, we did pursue herd immunity because we didn’t want to learn anything from Asians and we know that we don’t follow rules so we couldn’t see why you lot would. we’ve been slow to change our minds and even now the government are doing everything wrong. I can say this because I was sacked and so I can pretend it was nothing to do with me. I mean, why would it be? I’m a genius and here are some acronyms and graphs you won’t understand. Oh, and I’ll pretend that it’s the fault of psychologists because it’s fun to say pseudo-scientists.”

The big news with this planned wedding, though, is that Boris is prepared to pay for it himself. Not the venue, obviously, because that’s going to be Chequers, which he gets to use when he likes but he will pay for the food and presumably the flowers and the vicar. The poor man. You have to feel sorry for him. Clearly, strapped for every penny, he can be seen scouring the reduced shelf of Tesco on a Saturday evening. In the scrum, waiting for the 1p bread rolls, or the slightly dented tomatoes. That’s what happens when you are so poor you have to persuade a mate to smuggle in £12,500 worth of gourmet takeaways during a pandemic and borrow money to do up your rented council flat. The poor man. 

Hasn’t he ever heard of getting the bride’s father to pay for it?

This might be an old fashioned approach. Even we didn’t do that (completely) 30 years ago although my parents did pay for the venue and catering. It also might be more tricky for Carrie to tap up her old man. Matthew Symonds is a journalist (founded the Independent) and could probably afford it but I guess that his wife and three children might not be quite so happy for him to fund his love-child’s extravagant tastes, although, this might not be a problem as the whole family tree is littered with children born out of affairs.

Whatever happen with Boris and Carrie’s wedding I think we can be certain the marriage won’t last as long or as be as happy as my marriage to the LSH. He is one very lucky man. Finding the one person I wanted to annoy for the rest of my life has meant that today I’m not going to think any more about politics .

 Instead I’m going to put pearls before swine and have lunch at the Blue Strawberry to celebrate 30 years of wedded hysteria. It’s a joy to find someone that makes you laugh, even after all this time.