Thelma and Louise Attend a Wedding

Find me standing at the check in desk of any given hotel and there I will be laden up to the eyeballs with home comforts: namely my fuzzy twinkly grey blanket and my squishiest, featheriest blue pillow. I can’t sleep without them. And if I don’t sleep the bones in my legs dissolve and the poor soul unlucky enough to be sharing a room with me suffers my wrath in the middle of the night when there is no real air to breathe,  and you can hear next door snoring through paper thin walls…

Lucky for Kath then that I hadn’t left the house without said snuggly things and thus I found myself in the car on Friday night listening to her wailing along to the BeeGee’s as we made our way to Newcastle for the wedding of one of her closest friends,  eating fizzy fish and bickering like a pair of old men over directions.
   
But what a scrumptiously, delightfully silly wedding it was! The bride and groom arrived for their nuptials together and skipped  hand in hand (No really!) down the aisle to the  opening beats  of "I Believe In A Thing Called Love" by The Darkness. (I’ve never seen anything as daft and wonderful  in my life.)  There was no pomp. No ceremony. Just a teeny gathering of friends, family, and me, watching this deliriously happy little couple declare their undying love for each other, and feeling stupidly happy when the wedding cake turned out to be made of the darkest, richest chocolate instead of the usual fruity to do.

It was fun. There were egg sandwiches and red wine, the cutest little babba  demented with tiredness but determined to dance her little legs off , a professional  belly dancing guest who  couldn’t sit still and has awoken in me the urge to go wobble my tummy on a regular basis,  enthralling conversation with complete strangers and an incident Kath found so funny she nearly choked on her samosa…

There I was minding my own business. A bit in love with the belly dancing girl and more than happy to sit nursing a long G and T and watch the world and his father in laws new wife get their groove on.  Repeat: I was minding my own business. Pity then, that the man in the beige suit wasn’t.  Up he came and accosted us. Arms around me and Kaths shoulders, declaring us to be failing in our duties as wedding guests and insisting that we dance. We giggled in a girly fashion, like the thirty five year old grown women we are. And hoped he would go away. But it was not to be.  He had apparently fallen in love with my earrings. So he groped them. Just stopped short of licking them. Then kopped a feel of my beads.  And I watched in horror as this man with a twinkly fetish used all his might to resist throwing his hand down my top and fiddling with sequins on my bra, before he was suddenly overcome and lunged at me, tongue wiggling its way down my throat while I kicked up my heels and screamed into his mouth and he dislodged himself, and added insult to lip smacking injury by turning to Kath and saying "You my darling are beautiful, but you are not a patch on your esteemed colleague". Which quite frankly is like telling Kate Moss she isn’t as beautiful as her esteemed colleague, Janet street Porter.

How bloody rude can you be?? Oh God, it was hideous. Not only did my lips need disinfecting, but he highly insulted my bestest friend. And the fact that he later turned out to be a pseudo pop star with a song in the charts did not a jot of difference make.  Just seems to me that no matter who they are, men come over all crackers at weddings. Women do the funky chicken and laugh at themselves during the Timewarp, while wierd little members of the male species drink too much, get boyish and make daft statements like the one another man felt the urge to bestow upon me at the bar: "I like you. You are an interesting mix of cleavage and computer geekery".  Said with a wink and obligatory wandering hand.

Who could resist charm like that? I tell ya, it simply doesn’t pay to be one of only two single women at a thirty something wedding…

So we  retreated to the safety of our hotel room, where the only scary thing to be seen was me without my make up and a cup of peppermint tea and we watched the repeats of Jonathan Ross and dwelled on the merits of Gareth Gates while Kath tickled herself with the memory of my face during the pop star nightmare and I fell asleep with my eyes open, mumbling about gypsies and balsalmic vinegar, and wrapped up snug in my grey blanket with a complimentary fruit shortcake in my hand.

Rock and roll!