Chill Da Wren

Children. Hmm. I'm not great with kids. They make me uncomfortable and I never know what to say to them. Why this is the case, I don't know. Thinking about it, I never got on with kids when I was one so there's no reason why I should get on with them now. Then again, I often don't get on with grown-ups either. Fuck it: people, I basically have a problem with people. But children in particular are small and weird and I don't know what they're for.

Case in point: a couple I know, good friends, have a son who must be about three years-old (I can't be exact without sawing him in half and counting the rings). This little boy had never taken to me. Whenever I attempted to communicate with him he always gave me this slightly uneasy look as if I were some tramp who barks and rambles incoherently at you and just won't go away even though you have given him all your spare change. (To be fair, though, he's a wary little thing and looks at most people like that; it's not just me).

So, we're all at my mate's wedding in Glasgow and guess who I've been placed next to during the wedding breakfast - that's right, the little boy who looks at me as if I'm the biggest freak alive*. What to do, what to say? I sit there talking to my pals round the table, occasionally glancing in the kid's direction and smiling but he is too busy investigating a bottle of bubble solution and a bubble ring. He was having trouble getting the hang of blowing bubbles but eventually managed to blow some across the table in front of me. I cooed some googly baby noises and made a grab for the bubbles that passed before me. The little man seemed greatly amused by this. He was even more amused when his bubbles ended up floating on the head of my beer and amused still further to blow bubbles in my face when the starters arrived. Then his dad and I tried to catch the bubbles in our mouths which he thought was the funniest thing ever.

I was his pal after that and he no longer looks at me as if I might be a maniac who could kill him with an axe.

Oh Christ, this post is quite sweet. I do apologise. I don't know what's come over me. I'll try and find something to rage about next time.

* Don't even think it, motherfucker.

When is a church wedding not a church wedding?

But enough about weird dreams: Let us return, gentle reader, to my Glasgow Odyssey.

Although, as an aside, "odyssey" is one of my problem words, a word that I can never remember how to spell and have to look up every time I use it. It's not as if I am generally bad at spelling - I have no problem remembering how to spell "onomatopoeia", for example - but there are a few words, "odyssey" being one of them, that just won't stick. "Occasionally" is another one: one "C" or two, one "S" or two? I never get it right first time.

Anyway, this wedding in Glasgow was held at a rather splendid building called St. Andrew's in the Square. It is a big old auditorium that has a café-bar in the basement which means that you can hire the space, the catering, the drinks and the waiting staff in one convenient package. But the great thing about St. Andrew's is that it is a restored 18th Century church but is no longer used as such. This means that you can have a church wedding but are not tied to having a religious ceremony (my friends had an humanist ceremony), and you can hold the reception complete with bar and band or DJ there as well. Result.

It really is a brilliant venue for a wedding and we had one hell of a party there. It almost makes me want to get married just so that I can hold my wedding there.

Almost.

Interpretations

The literal minded among you may interpret the dream related in my last post as an anxiety dream about my hiring a car to drive 100 miles to a wedding in Dorset having not driven for three years.

Maybe, but it all came back to me in seconds. I'd forgotten how cool driving is. I had my homemade Amon Tobin compilation CD blasting out the speakers and there wasn't too much traffic around so, apart from getting lost briefly due to confusingly labelled signposts and the odd obligatory muppet driver getting in my way, I really enjoyed myself.

Oh, and the wedding was quite good too: some blonde Welsh tart of my acquiantance was marrying some American fella. And if Suw Charman (for it was she) wasn't already queen of the blogosophosphere, she damn well will be when the photographs of her gravity-defying burgundy corset hit the interwebs. We are talking Cleaveage Of The Decade™. The geeks of the world will gawp in amazement when those puppies hit their Macbook screens. Oh, and a good time was had by all, yadda yadda yadda.

But I'm pretty certain that my driving dream was not about driving at all.

Nuptials and velvet

Hello chums. Sorry for my absence - I know how empty your lives are when I fail to post fascinating fragments of my daredevil existence on a regular basis. But fret ye not for I am here with yet more tales of derring-do to enthral and entertain.

So... ah... right then.

Went to a wedding last weekend. Yet another of my oldest and bestest chums has settled down with the woman of his dreams. Good for them: they are both lovely people who deserve to be obscenely happy together. Jammy bastards.

The weather behaved itself, fortunately: glorious sunshine everywhere rather than the overcast yet unpleasantly close humidity we have experienced this week. I am sat wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts as I write this, all flab and sweaty crevices. Nice. But I digress: the wedding. I lent my vocal chords to the wedding ceremony by reading a short but sweet extract from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (an enormously popular children's tale, apparently, even though I'd never heard of it). I imbued the passage with just the right level of theatricality and pathos even if I do say so myself. At least, people seemed to like it and nobody in the congregation yawned so I must have done quite well. I have to admit that I did spend a lot of time wandering around the church beforehand adopting a variety of highly inappropriate voices as I ran through the extract and caused the best man a great deal of anxiety. A whole new world of connotation opens when the passage is read in a highly camp voice:

"When a child loves you, not only to play with, but really, really loves you, then you become real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the horse, for he was always truthful. "But when you are real you don't mind being hurt."

My only disappointment was that I and the other reader were led to believe that we could perform our readings either from the lectern or the pulpit (the latter of which we both favoured as it appealed to our grandiose desire to lord it over the congregation) but when our time came the vicar directed us both to the lectern. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice lectern, but it weren't no pulpit.

And then everyone adjourned to a countryside restaurant, drank Pimm's on the lawn in the afternoon sunshine and caught up with old friends. All in all a most pleasant engagement. And despite the ever increasing number of children being spawned within my circle of friends, I managed to avoid inadvertently using grotesquely bad language within earshot of a toddler such as "fucktard" or "cuntflap". Result.