‘How does anyone young and stupid manage to get married?’ I kept shouting at the builder boyfriend as I pummelled the keys of my laptop to try to force the website of the registrar to give me a date.
It seems I picked the worst possible time to try to serve notice because, as anyone who has contacted a registrar lately will know, they are experiencing unprecedented demand for their services.
This dream I had of going down the local register office and getting quietly hitched with no fanfare was fading
Either there are record numbers of births or couples wanting to tie the knot, or this spike in excess death figures is really happening, and is not a figment of the conspiracy theorist’s imagination, nor has it been magically cured by the Office for National Statistics reframing the data recently by applying very clever calculus.
It is partly because so many of our acquaintances are dropping like flies that I want to ensure that the BB and I are each other’s next of kin. But I don’t want a wedding.
My history with weddings is not ideal. I got engaged in my thirties and called it off at the last minute, which did at least make for a sizeable chunk of a comic memoir.
Although it has good reviews, along with a novel I emitted shortly afterwards, in terms of sales I only know that I once discovered a heap of royalty statements in shreds down the back of the sofa.
They had been grabbed from the doormat repeatedly and eaten by the dog. She never did that with any other mail and I can only conclude she was trying to protect me. Out of loyalty, she ate my royalties.
Point is, because I cancelled a wedding, even if I did get a two-book deal out of it, this one has to be a simple, straightforward affair.
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