Good news Blog, the paint brush has arrived, the colour fits in so well with the décor, a sort of woody colour; which makes me wonder if I have wasted all my money in ordering this paintbrush because I question whether a stick from the garden would have done the same job. Oh well, not to worry, I mustn’t mind treating my wife occasionally; as long as she doesn’t come to expect to be showered with gifts from me. Special occasions, yes. No problem there. Occasions like our diamond wedding anniversary, or the Queens one hundredth birthday. Special occasions. When the brush arrived, I sneaked it upstairs so she didn’t see it. I wrapped it in some Christmas wrapping paper to make it look special. Luckily we had a lot of Christmas wrapping paper this year which we took off parcels that relatives had sent us. Most of it was quite easy to iron flat, so that it didn’t look as if it had been used before. Because we had so much, I threw caution to the wind and used a generous piece to wrap the brush. When I gave it to my wife, I watched her face to see the delight of having a surprise gift. I must say that she hid her feelings very well. She stopped herself from beaming at me and she showed remarkable self-restraint by not throwing her arms around me. I was impressed by her self-control. Sad to say that I have had no bids on e-bay for the old paintbrush which I wasted no time in advertising when the new one arrived.
Yesterday’s trudge was interesting. Out in the early morning to drop my car off at the garage for a service. The dealership I purchased the car from has ceased trading, so the franchise has been transferred to a dealership on the other side of the city. By 8:30am I was trudging back to the old estate enjoying a good wheeze form all the traffic fumes having dropped the car off. I swung round into the country, purposely passing the small village church where I signed up to wedded bliss over a life time ago. Interesting that … we had arranged to see the vicar in the evening to discuss the wedding date which gave us time to cook a meal after training before we saw him. We had never cooked with garlic before. When the recipe said to use a clove of garlic, we didn’t know what a clove was. So we used the whole bulb!!! Boy must we have stunk when we saw the vicar. No wonder he grabbed his crucifix and held it out in front of him as we entered the vicarage!! Why the rush to get married he enquired. No your vicarship, my future wife is not pregnant. The rush to get married in four weeks’ time your vicarship, is because I have an important date in six weeks’ time and I want to get this marrying business out of the way by then so I can concentrate on the important things in life. In six weeks’ time I have the selection trials for the European Games marathon. I don’t want my future wife going on and on and on and on about some wedding when I am trying to focus on my race. See reason, man. So it was fixed up and I got the weddying thing out of the way before the race.
From the church, I headed off in a northerly direction so I could view where we had the wedding reception. We only had enough people invited to the wedding to make up a rugby team (League of course, not Union). We had the reception at a castle. A real castle, Blog, I kid you not. A castle with a capital’C’. We cut our cake at the wedding breakfast with a sword!! Beat that Blog. A sword. A sharp sword. A very sharp sword!! It had to be sharp to cut through the concrete icing? Concrete icing, I hear you ask Blog? Yes. Concrete with a capital ‘C’. My future wife’s nan had offered to make all three tiers of the cake. She was in her 80s, but make the cake, all three tiers she did. But she wasn’t up to icing it. No problem. Well, what’s to icing a cake Blog?? Icing. No problem. Just make sure the icing on the bottom layer is thick enough to support the two layers above and make sure that the icing on the middle layer is strong enough to support the top layer, advised my future wife’s nan. And don’t forget to put a bit of dolly blue in the icing to make it very white, advised my future wife’s nan. Two problems there Blog. Problem one:- how were we to know how much icing to use to be assured that the bottom layer of icing was thick enough to support the two layers above and to make sure that the middle layer of icing was strong enough to support the top layer? Problem two:- how much is a ‘bit of dolly blue in the icing to make it very white’. We did the icing. We got it nice and flat. We got it nice and square. We left a small amount of icing on one side to test it’s strength when it had set. We tested the small amount of icing when it had set by trying to break it by hand. We were unable to break the small amount of icing by hand. We tested the small amount of icing when it had set by trying to cut it with a knife. We were unable to cut the small amount of icing with a knife. We tested the small amount of icing when it had set by trying to cut it with a sharp carving knife. We were unable to cut the small amount of icing with a sharp carving knife. With the careful use of a hammer we were able to cut the small piece of icing. We concluded that the bottom layer of icing would be thick enough to support the two layers above and that the middle layer of icing would be strong enough to support the top layer, Unfortunately, we now had a bright blue wedding cake. Blog, I kid you not. Bright blue. BLUE. My future wife nan’s idea of a ‘bit’ of dolly blue and our idea of a ‘bit’ of dolly blue seemed to have not quite tallied. Did we go for blue wedding cake? Should we be different? So it was back to the mixing bowl and back to icing production in a big way! It was a bright shiny white wedding cake ………….. but as the very sharp sword cut through the top layer of our wedding cake, a stratus of blue was clearly visible, sandwiched between the white layers!! My best man asked for his money back, my father-in-law asked if he could have his daughter back and the vicar wanted to know if the blue layer was something to do with the garlic fetish we seemed to have.
Passed the castle, I made a bee line for home passing the site where I had my caravan parked. I have mentioned to you previously Blog, that I used to live in a caravan. Not a mobile home … a caravan with a capital ‘C’. I was knackered.
I had told the garage to give me a ring on the telephone when the car was ready for picking up. I had a shower, dressed and had a strong drink of recovery coffee when the telephone rang. The garage was giving me a ring to say that my car was ready to be picked up. I undressed, put kit on and made a bee line for the caravan, the castle and the church to pick my car up from the garage. I drove home. I was knackered. Two o’clock, two sessions. I fell asleep in the chair. My wife woke me when it was time to go to bed.
Colin
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