D E C E M B E R   2 0 2 2 

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

Don't sweat the small stuff - there's too much of it!

 I felt like I needed a traditional Christmas rant, so here it is:

 I’ve been despairing again about the news. 

    Yes, the stories of war atrocities, injustice, political unrest, the cost of living crisis, strikes by public sector workers, the increase in food banks and homelessness, the Tories’ latest debacle, the economy, etc etc etc are all deeply depressing. However, what really annoys me is the banality and pointless exaggeration of much of the news I read online. Apparently, this country has been gripped by a Big Freeze over the past few weeks, when in reality it has been a normal seasonal chill – the real story is the fact that my geraniums were still in flower in my garden at the end of November. In Yorkshire. Yes, we’ve had frost and a bit of snow, recently, but this isn’t abnormal in Winter, is it?

    And then there are the non-stories. Here’s one I just read on the Huffington Post. Apparently, a man in Derbyshire ordered an expensive Macbook Pro laptop for his daughter for Christmas, from Amazon, and was instead sent two boxes of Pedigree Chum.

Ok, this is mildly amusing, unless it happens to you, but even if it does happen to you, it’s a relatively trivial blip in life’s rich tapestry, I would have thought.

The man in the story explained how Amazon’s initial response was to refuse to refund his money, which seems unlikely to me and suggests they had misunderstood or that there was more to the story than the news item suggested. Anyway, they subsequently apologised and promised to repay him, so presumably all is now well.

The aspect of this story that struck me was how varied human personalities are in their responses to what are in reality minor inconveniences, but how the responses that are reported in the media are always the ‘outraged’ type. These stories would have no readworthy aspect at all if the protagonist wasn’t presented as being an ‘outraged victim’ of something or other, and we weren’t all invited, and expected, to become outraged on thie behalf.

According to the media, the population of this country are in a permanent state of outrage, or at least they ought to be. Everything from the gender pay-gap to Autumn leaves falling on their lawns seems to make people apoplectic with fury. There doesn’t seem to be any nuance, and the media seems to expect us all to ratchet up our own emotional responses when we read these stories too. As far as I’m concerned, a man being sent the wrong item by Amazon is a complete non-story, barely an anecdote in fact. It might evoke a small smile, but outrage? Surely outrage is an emotion best kept in reserve for things that really deserve it, such as people voting to leave the EU or a homeless Polish man being beaten to death by a British racist.

 

The man who received the dog food by mistake had, tragically for him, been recently diagnosed with a serious health condition, and this was used in the article as a supposed reason to view Amazon’s blunder as being somehow more significant than it was and the man’s experience somehow more upsetting than it would have been for someone else. But, much as I believe that companies like Amazon are run by the Devil’s Disciples, it isn’t as if the CEO called the warehouse and said ‘Make sure you send dog-food instead of an Apple laptop to Mr X because we’ve just found out he’s suffering from XXX’, is it? It’s terrible for this poor man to have been diagnosed with a serious illness, but I’m sure that, of Amazon’s many erroneous deliveries (they’re a huge company so they’re bound to make many errors), there will obviously be a proportion that are misdelivered to people with serious health conditions. This doesn’t make the error somehow more heinous than if they were delivered to the super-fit, does it? Looking at it another way, you might argue that this particular man must be wealthier than many people in this country as he can afford to spend £1200 on his daughter’s Christmas present. I can’t afford a Macbook Pro, for example. But this doesn’t mean that Amazon’s error is less difficult for him to deal with. It’s just an error, and errors happen because people make mistakes now and then, particularly massive companies employing huge numbers of staff and underpaying most of them. That’s what we should be outraged about.

It is also the lack of logic that makes me despair. I’m as guilty as anyone of this. We all ‘instinctively’ feel that if we’ve thrown two sixes in a row, the next throw is less likely to be another six. Or if we use a different lottery number from the one we’ve used for the past five years, this will be the week those numbers come up. The ‘victim’ of this ‘terrible tragedy’ suffered from a different kind of logical fallacy. He was quoted as saying he had bought things from Amazon for twenty years with no problems, but he was no longer going to shop with them, which seems a weirdly illogical thing to do. If they have been reliable for two decades but make one minor blip which they put right, even if they annoy their customer by initially being unhelpful and even rude, isn’t this like cutting off your nose to spite your face? Surely, shopping on the High Street or even online shopping in various different stores is going to be more inconvenient and stressful, particularly for someone with a serious health condition, than continuing to use a company that has been reliable for twenty years? It’s like saying ‘Well, my friend has supported me through thick and thin since we were children, but she accidentally broke my lamp last week so I’m never going to speak to her again’.

I am not supporting Amazon here. Like most people, I find the company a very convenient way to buy things, and I love my Kindle. However, I still have misgivings about many of its business practices. And I’m not knocking poor Mr X in Derbyshire who received two boxes of dog food when he’d ordered a computer – most of us would be at the very least a bit miffed by this.

But please let’s get things into perspective. Let’s think about what really is news and what isn’t. Let’s try not to let the everyday problems we all experience now and again overwhelm us or seem much bigger than they really are. Let’s focus our anger on people who really deserve it – say, Elon Musk.

One thing that I’ve learned since I reached my fifties is that time goes past ever more quickly – tempus fugit indeed! – and even the important stuff passes by in a blur. Your car needs a new tyre, you have to cancel a get-together due to Covid, you’re worried about going to the dentist for a filling, the train is delayed, you haven’t bought sis’s Christmas present yet, they’ve run out of satsumas at your local supermarket, you’ve put on a few pounds, you ordered a copy of ‘A Christmas Carol’ from Amazon and they sent you a pound of sausages instead. These things will pass. You’ll deal with them, one way or another, and they’ll be replaced by some other trivial problem.

So don’t get outraged. It’s bad for your physical and mental health. Don’t let the media wind you up. Just deal with the problem and move on. Do something worthwhile to fill your memory bank with joy instead. Join a choir. Go to an Art Gallery. Go on a protest march. Become a Samaritan. Drop some groceries into a food bank collection point. Organise a Christmas party for your elderly neighbours. Phone your parents. Take in a stray cat.

On your deathbed, you don’t want to waste your time regretting not decking the delivery person who brought you the wrong item from Amazon.

Publications in 2022

Here is a list of the pieces I have had published, placed in competitions or shortlisted in 2022:

Secret Attic – stories which won 1^st prize:                  - 

The Leaf [Picture This!]

Different Worlds [drabble]

 

‘The Artist’ [poem] was accepted by New Verse News, Thursday 24 February 2022,https://newversenews.blogspot.com/search?q=Louise+Wilford

 

‘Blue’ [poem] was accepted for Issue 53 of Silver Blade (May 2022*)

 

‘The Immigrants’ [poem] was accepted for the American Diversity Report [ADR], a spin-off of Silver Blade,  Jun 2022 issue

 

‘Backwards’ [short story] was accepted by River & South, published in Summer 2022,  https://riverandsouth.com/index.php/2022/06/17/backwardslouise-wilford/

 

‘Quake’, ‘No Seeds Were Lost’ [poems] and ‘L and Mark’ [short story] were accepted for Makarelle, Spring edition, theme: Landmarks,  https://makarelle.com/

 

‘Pink’ [comic poem] won an informal Facebook comp on Suffolk Writers group

 

Four five-line poems were accepted by Punk Noir, April 2022

 

‘Misunderstood’ [Flash] was accepted by Pine Cone Review, Issue 4https://thepineconereview.com/louise-wilford-misunderstood-issue-4/

 

‘Miranda’s Child’ [short story] was accepted by 805  https://www.805lit.org/post/mirandas-child

 

‘To The Youngest’ and ‘Thistle’ [poems] were accepted by Last Leaves, Issue 5 (theme: Growth):  https://www.lastleavesmag.com/last-leaves-issues https://www.lastleavesmag.com/_files/ugd/dccfc8_88b991023bc845f180be7def8e01249c.pdf    ‘Thistle’ on p141, ‘To The Youngest’ on p153

 

‘Target’, ‘Dressed to Impress’, and another piece of flash fiction were accepted for the ‘Flash Mob’ anthology of Flash Fiction organised by Crossing The Tees Festival

 

‘Pigs can’t swim’ [short story] was accepted by Fairlight Books and appeared in the summer:  https://www.fairlightbooks.co.uk/short_stories/pigs-cant-swim/.

 

‘Basil’ [children’s short story] was nominated for Best Of The Net 2022 by Amanda Marerro, editor of Parakeet children's magazine

 

‘Dead Batteries and ‘Shy’ [poems] were accepted for Bindweed's Winter Wonderland Anthology, being published on 21 December

 

‘Crimes and Misdeameanours’ [short story] was accepted by Makarelle, and appeared in the Summer 2022 edition, themed ‘Sizzling Misdemeanours’ https://makarelle.com/

 

‘A Public Enquiry Into The Case Of Edward Overdice’ [short story] was shortlisted for Dark Matter but not ultimately chosen

 

‘Choose’ [Flash] came third in the Fosseway Flash Fiction Competition 2022

 

‘The Sea On The Doorstep’ [children’s short story] was accepted for Parakeet, to appear in next edition published on 15 January, 2023   https://www.honeyguidemag.com/parakeet-shop

‘Visiting the T-Rex in the National History Museum’ and ‘The Word Worm’ [poems] were accepted for Balloons Lit available by the end of 2022
www.balloons-lit-journal.com 

 

‘The Goddess Of The Free’ [poem] was accepted for POTB, Issue 17, out on 21 May 2023

 

‘On Christmas Morning’ was read out (beautifully) by the lovely Gae Stenson at Wirrall Poets Christmas poetry reading on Wed 14 December

Book Reviews: What I've read since last month

 Transcriptions & Human Croquet Kate Atkinson

   

Anyone who has read the book reviews on my blog before will know I am a huge Kate Atkinson fan. During the past month, I have read the last two of her novels downloaded onto my Kindle and I suspect this means I’m up-to-date with her current oeuvre, so no more to read for a while, sadly.

Human Croquet was a title I had on my Kindle for years without reading. I actually thought it was by Rose Tremain, though that wasn’t why I was avoiding reading it as I like her books too. It just kept slipping out of my sight-line, for some reason. Anyway, I have now read it. It is a novel about fairytales and Shakespeare and forests, common themes in Atkinson’s work. Transcriptions, a novel about spies in WW2 and the BBC in the 1950s, has a central character called Juliet and frequent references to Shakespeare.

            Having read Atkinson’s masterpieces A God in Ruins and Life After Life within the past six months, and having very recently re-read her stunning debut Behind The Scenes In The Museum, I was at first rather underwhelmed by Human Croquet. It had Atkinson’s characteristic humour, diversions into the almost-magical and the certainly weird, but these moments were finally explained away by ‘reality’. The apparent time-slips and alternative realities in the novel were very compelling to me however, though they are given a mundane explanation at the end. Atkinson has great skill at conveying the experience of dysfunctional family relationships and this book displays this power very vividly. It also contains at least one monstrous human being.

            By contrast, Transcriptions isn’t concerned with families but with the loyalties and betrayals of wartime colleagues and friends, bound together and split apart by duty and ideology (and by shared trauma). It is a novel whose central theme is fidelity – it asks us to consider the meaning of faithfulness, of patriotism, of the truth, and of treason and duplicity. Like all Atkinson’s novels, it has moments of great humour. Juliet is a mistress of dry wit, and there are several set-piece scenes, particularly in the early part of the story, where her youthful naivity makes her a deeply unreliable and comic character. But this is a serious novel, ultimately, dealing with grave, sometimes frightening, realities. Overall, I found Juliet herself a rather distant, unsympathetic character. I don’t think I would like her if we met, whereas I could imagine liking the central character of Human Croquet in real life. The adult Juliet has an emotional control that makes her seem distant – she is interesting and cares about others, but she is such a private person, for reasons that become clear as the novel progresses, that it is difficult to fully warm to her.

            Both novels are definitely worth a read, particularly if you’re an Atkinson fan.

 

***** Excellent – highly recommended, though not her absolute best

 

Breathing Lessons Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler sets her novels in Baltimore, and you do get a flavour of the city from them. However, what they really give you is an insight into human relationships, particularly those within families. Like Kate Atkinson, she is a mistress of the domestic drama – unshowy, unflamboyant, often quietly profound, often humorous, always devastatingly realistic, she unpicks the strands that bind and divide people, with immense skill.

            She is best known for her 1985 novel, The Accidental Tourist, which was made into an excellent film starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. This novel, along with her 1982 novel Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant (my personal favourite) and Breathing Lessons (1988) were all shortlisted for The Pulitzer Prize, and she has won and been nominated for many other awards.

            Her central skill is in her attention to detail. Without becoming pedantic or clogged down in the trivial, she manages to capture the nuances of everyday relationships with superb intricacy. Her characters sound like real people. The couple in Breathing Lessons have the sorts of arguments we all do, and speak in the sort of language real people do, just with a Baltimore accent. They engage in throwaway bickering, they have banal conversations which often disguise deeper emotions, they misunderstand each other and sometimes understand each other more than they let on. They say things which the readers, with our broader knowledge of what different characters are thinking, recognize as revealing aspects of their characters unknown to themselves.

            The action in Breathing Lessons takes place during one day, when Ira and Maggie Moran are driving to a friend’s funeral and then home again. Along the way, they have several minor adventures and there are numerous opportunities for them to reminisce and squabble and wind each other up, and to forgive and understand each other’s idiosyncracies. We find out about their youth and how they met, about their children and their grandchild. The book is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and occasionally brings tears to your eyes. The characters are utterly believable, and the tone is generous, sensitive, sympathetic, but always unsentimental. I loved this novel, though it isn’t as good as Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant, which I believe everyone ought to read.

            Many of Kate Atkinson’s novels are set in the mid twentieth century, and many of Anne Tyler’s novels were written in a contemporary world which is now decades old. The advantages of this are that characters don’t have mobile phones and the internet – they feel like they are about a different world in some ways. However, human relationships don’t change. It is only in characters’ interactions with their contemporary milieu that things are expressed differently perhaps – the essential tensions and bonds between people remain much the same from generation to generation. Atkinson is a more whimsical writer, more likely to engage in magic realism than Tyler, but both are extremely good at conveying the subtleties of marriage, parenthood, and friendship.

***** Highly recommended

 

Burns Books series by Liz Hedgecock

   

   etc

This is an unchallenging series of comic fantasy novels about a magical bookshop. It has a magical cat, dangerous books, an immortal owner, vampires, a coffee shop (by book 2) – oh, and an ordinary, modern young woman with a degree in Business Studies who becomes it’s manager. What’s not to like?

            Well, it is written in a very straightforward and rather unexciting way and the plots are remarkably simple. It is essentially a child’s book but for grown-ups. Everything is explained, even spelled-out – very little is a surprise for the reader, unless the reader is someone who is very easily surprised. Characters are uncomplicated and predictable, and above all never horrifying or genuinely scary. There is a lot of narrating of everyday activity iike serving customers and filling shelves and choosing what to have for your tea. The central character, Jemma James, is perfectly likeable but deeply unrealistic. She is sweet, kind, warm, efficient, rather naïve, has a comical faith in modern HR procedures and business-speak, and has the rather chaste relationship with the young man who runs the bookshop’s coffee shop of a girl-next-door from a 1950s or 60s novel that your mum would approve of you reading.

All this means you don’t have to worry about having your emotions put through the wringer. You won’t be kept awake by the exciting plot twists or sudden unexpected diversions, as everything is well-signposted. This is definitely ‘cozy’ fantasy. Words like ‘gentle’, ‘restful’, ‘undemanding’ come to mind when I think of how to describe the series. It is in fact excellent bedtime reading if you like mild fantasy of a rather unimaginative kind. Hedgecock does this stuff very well, and it is a definite niche for aspiring writers.

*** good bedtime reading if you like ‘cozy’ as a genre

 

The Twenty-Twenty Club

 

Christmas

Flash Fiction Competition

2022

Joint Winners: 

'Noelle' by Beck Collett 

'Christmas Lights' by Sue Davnall

WInner of best story-title: 

'The Clavering Optiscope' by Ron Hardwick

Commended:

‘One Hundred Words For Qanuks’ by Beck Collett

‘Toby’ by Beck Collett

‘Home for Christmas’ by Sue Davnall

‘Dear Luke’ by Antonia Dunn

‘The Clavering Optiscope’ by Ron Hardwick

‘She’ll Adore Him’ by DHL Hewa [Devi]

‘Christmas Present’ by Colin Johnson

‘Christmas Eve’ by Ruth Loten

WINNING STORIEs:

Noelle

by Beck Collett

  

‘Now, Joanna,’ Maureen (her boss at the elderly complex) had said, ‘some – but not all – of our guests like their flat to be trimmed up for Christmas. It is not for you to judge, only to listen and do. If they want an olive-green bauble covered in cobwebs to be hung on a wonky tree, then so be it. If their pride and joy is a bald doll with a torn doily for a dress, and bent tin-foil wings, you tell them it’s beautiful and stick it on top of their tree. Got it? Good. Number eleven first.’

 

Number eleven: Doula’s flat. Doula was like a riddle Jo couldn’t crack. The idea she wanted her flat festooned contrasted wonderfully with the always dark, and sometimes horrifying, stories she told Jo.

            ‘That one round the back, girl, where I don’t have to look at it.’ Doula had managed to make decorating the tree an ordeal, berating her every time she picked up a threadbare bauble or battered cracker. Now, only the angel remained.

‘Handle her with care,’ Doula said, in a gentle voice, ‘she’s special.’

Indeed, she was. Her tin-foil wings bent, paper-doily dress (held on with yellowing tape) torn, and on top of a tangle of yellow hair clung a shining halo.

Jo lifted the angel up for a closer look, and gasped. ‘Oh, it’s a tiny bangle! How lovely. Whose was it?’

Doula stared, entranced, at the little angel, as Jo placed her carefully atop the wonky tree. ‘Was Noelle’s,’ she replied, and reached up and touched the angel. ‘She was due on Christmas. Born still Jan third. Never got the chance to wear it, so the angel does. Like she’s still here. Just life,’ she said to Jo, who was busy blinking back tears, ‘just life.’

 

 

 Christmas Lights

by Sue Davnall

Night had fallen in the quiet Cardiff street. Rain bounced fiercely off the glistening pavements; it hadn’t let up all day. In the small bay windows giving on to the pavement lights began to come on, casting their gleam across the puddles. It was like the TVs in the Radio Rentals window of Luke’s long-distant childhood: each stone-framed aperture showed a different picture. In number ten, for instance, there was an oversized Christmas tree draped in tinsel, piles of jazzily wrapped presents stacked beneath, a couple of billowy sofas swamped with cushions, a cacophony of colour. Next door at number twelve was a much smaller tree and many candles of all shapes and sizes – thick church candles, spindly taper candles, a seven-branched candelabrum, a myriad tealights in dainty holders, all in muted green and silver. Number fourteen – that was where the Singhs lived. Christmas wasn’t their thing but they weren’t going to miss out on the fun: through their window Luke saw low couches with throws of gorgeous hue, golden platters on the tables laden with delicious-looking sweets, and a pile of presents waiting to be unwrapped.

              Across the road, one window glowed more dimly than its neighbours. There was no tree, no pile of presents - just a threadbare carpet, a stained and sagging sofa, dirty cups and plates on the floor. Luke had seen the children in the street sometimes, under-dressed and under-fed.

              He pulled from his bag two small parcels, clumsily wrapped in brown paper and string. Placing them carefully on the doorstep out of the rain he rang the bell then walked briskly away before heading for his usual corner under the railway arch for the night.

 

 

 

The Clavering Optiscope

by Ron Hardwick

 

The boy stood, thin jacket flapping in the bitter cold, looking in the antique shop window. Sleet eddied about his tousled hair, but he didn’t care.

‘What a telescope,’ he muttered. ‘Wish I had fifteen quid.’

An elderly gentleman in an old-fashioned frock coat and derby hat stood by him.

‘Interested in telescopes, are you, sonny?’

‘Oh yes, mister. They open up the sky for you. I’d love to see the moon and the planets through one.’

‘Perhaps you’ll be lucky this Christmas?’

‘No, mister. There’s just Ma and me. We ain’t got much. ‘Spect I'll get an apple and an orange, as usual.’

‘Pity. What’s your name, sonny?’

‘Jimmy Black.’

‘And where do you live?’

‘20 Dinning Street.’

‘You don’t want that telescope, Jimmy. It’s not worth a pound, let alone fifteen.’

‘How do you know?’

‘My name is Hugo Clavering. I used to build them. I invented the Clavering Optiscope. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’

‘Sorry, mister, I ain’t.’

‘Never mind. Goodbye, Jimmy, and Merry Christmas.’

 

Christmas morning arrived.

‘Parcel for you, Jimmy. Left on the step. Must be a food parcel from one o’ they charities.’

‘Thanks, Ma.’ Jimmy tore at the parcel. In it was a long wooden box. He opened it and squealed with delight.

‘Oh, Ma, it’s a Clavering Optiscope.’

‘Can’t eat a telescope,’ observed Ma.

‘Oh, it’s so lovely, Ma. Brass. Built by hand. I must go out and test it. I’ll look at the moon. I’ll see the Man in the Moon’s face. I wonder if he’ll be smiling.’

Jimmy lived next to the cemetery. He walked through it as dawn broke. He extended the telescope and focused it on the gravestones. One inscription leapt out at him:

Hugo Clavering, telescope-maker, passed away on Christmas Day, 1920. Sorely missed.

 

     

 

  NOVEMBER 2022  

Tales From The Hobbit-Hole: The Social Event of 2022

 

Possibly better late than never

 

As many of you know, P and I got spliced last December – on the Winter Solstice, with a date of 21/12/21, so P has no excuse for forgetting our anniversary!

However, due to the Covid pandemic, we had to postpone our reception party. After much deliberation, we finally decided to have the ‘do’ on Saturday 29 October 2022, almost a year after the wedding, and slightly too close to Halloween for comfort – there was always the risk that some people would turn up dressed as zombies or skeletons.

There were several downers in the run-up to the reception, including guests cancelling due to trivial issues such as having a serious heart condition or being stalked by elephants on safari in Kenya. People can be so self-centred! On the morning of the party, one of our neighbours died suddenly and the street was full of police cars and ambulances, which felt like a bad omen. One of our oldest friends, Martin, who was actually supposed to be giving one of the speeches, had to drop out because his elderly mother was in hospital after a fall and had taken a sudden turn for the worse on Saturday morning (she has improved since). We didn’t find out that Martin and his partner wouldn’t be there until the last moment, so there were two empty chairs throughout the meal, like ghosts at the feast!

              Despite this, the party went off fairly well, though there was in the end no dancing, despite the best efforts of my two friends from Kent, both of whom are more than a decade older than me but have twice my energy. I hadn’t seen Jude and Carole in the flesh for many years and when they arrived the day before the reception and we took them to a local restaurant, I flung my arms round them when I saw them, even though I am a non-hugger of long standing. In fact, I must have drunk a little more than I thought because I hugged several people at the reception, including one of P’s university friends whom I barely know, which startled him even more than it startled me!  Anyway, even the good-humoured enthusiasm of Carole and Jude, nor our kick-ass playlist, wasn't enough to get the toes tapping – it was like trying to get the good folk of Bomont to do the macarena.

We had paid a firm of venue decorators to decorate the room, and they did a great job. I spent hours in the run-up to the actual wedding last December, which had a Christmas theme, putting together handmade Christmas crackers, which were surprisingly fiddly and irritating. So, even though it was no longer a Christmas event, I felt obliged to use the crackers. P, the MC and The Best Woman went over to the venue and put them out on the table, along with the name-cards I had made (each with a personalized painting on it) and the favour bags. 

  

Some of the crackers contained those long balloons used by children’s entertainers who make animals out of them. I thought this would keep some guests amused, but the box the balloons came in only contained one little air-pump to blow them up, and people didn’t seem inclined to share it. It was amusing to see guests going purple-faced with the effort of trying to blow up the balloons by mouth. My sister managed to make half a poodle with hers, but it ended up being a kind of hammer that my eight-year-old great-nephew used to hit people on the head with when he became fed-up with the intrinsic dullness of a wedding reception with no drunken dancing. We had feared that he would be bored out of his skull, as the only child present, and of course he was, but we made sure his favour-bag was full of things to entertain him. He spent the first hour being painfully shy and the last being just painful, but I didn’t see much of him in the middle part of the evening.

I had used up all the original silver and white favour bags that I’d prepared last December (we gave them to people as extra Christmas presents along with a piece of our original wedding cake) so I had to buy new ones. However, the only ones I could get hold of at short notice in the right colour were about twice the size of the original ones and I just couldn’t stop myself wanting to fill them up. Several people have commented since, in slightly disapproving tones, that they were ‘rather on the large size’, but my attitude is ‘Who wants three jelly beans in a net bag anyway?’. If you’re going to have a ‘Thank you for coming to the wedding’ gift, it might as well be a large bag stuffed with pointless rubbish rather than a single small example of pointless rubbish. I also printed out the menu choices individuals had made and attached this to the favour bags, which I considered to be a thoughtful and helpful touch, though I was informed by two separate family members that it was an example of my control-freakery.  It didn’t help much anyway, as there was still some confusion when the food was served, particularly because Martin and Angela were absent. One guest didn’t get the pie he'd asked for and ended up having to have the fish instead – but he was compensated to some extent by getting an extra portion of sticky toffee pudding, as my mum couldn’t face hers. He will henceforward be known as ‘Two Puds John’.

P and The Best Woman

Several things failed to go to plan. My hair colour wasn’t quite what I wanted and it wasn’t styled quite as well as on the actual wedding day. I wore the same outfit but bought a new bag and new shoes as the glittery stilettos I wore to the wedding were like instruments of torture, and the matching bag continually slipped off my shoulder. I ended up dropping the new bag into a box in which we’d transported some gifts and, as it had my phone in it, I forgot to take any photos after the first few we took when we arrived. I actually have no photos of myself at the reception at all.

              Though the staff worked very hard, the woman who was supposedly in charge, Natalie, wasn’t there as it was her day off, and there were several minor things which didn’t go the way she had assured us they would. They thought the meal was happening at 7.30 rather than 7.00; they said they would provide a child menu for our single child guest but we had to ask for this; there was no rack for people to hang their coats on so we had to pile all the coats on a table at the back of the room. The room was incredibly warm, particularly once everyone arrived, and several of us ended up chatting in the car-park just to cool down – it was an unseasonably warm evening for late October in Yorkshire! The venue appeared to have two large windows which were covered by blinds, but in fact these were either windows that couldn’t be opened or else they were bricked up! The staff didn’t turn the music off during the speeches, until we actually asked them to, halfway through the first speech. The waitress was standing right next to the music system at the time, but our hand gestures and meaningful facial expressions didn’t cut through her screensaver day-dream  and the groom had to get up, go over to her and ask her to turn it off, during the MC’s opening words.

              There was a remarkably steep staircase with a wobbly banister up to the actual room where the reception party took place. I had to hoist myself up, hand-over-hand, as if dragging myself aboard a schooner in choppy waters, and there were many people there older or even more infirm than me. My friend’s husband, who has ‘a wonky ankle’, managed to both fall up the stairs and slip coming down, and he wasn’t even drunk. However, he also tripped over a plant pot in the outdoor seating area on his way to his car, so I think he was just having a Norman Wisdom evening.

Natalie had also assured me that the chef at the venue would cut up the wedding cake, but when I asked the waitress, she shrugged and said the chef had gone home! We had paid for an expensive, professionally-made cake for the original wedding reception last December, so we had decided to just buy a pre-made one this time from Marks and Spencers or somewhere, but our friend Helen stepped in and made us an absolutely delicious cake (fruit cake on bottom layer, chocolate cake on top) which she iced and decorated with autumnal flowers, rosehips, pine cones etc. It was gorgeous. The waitress gave us a ridiculously pathetic knife so that Helen could cut up the cake herself, which I was embarrassed about.

The Wedding Cake, decorated with Autumnal flowers and foliage

The highlight of the evening was of course the speeches. I wasn’t giving one myself so I was able to sit back and quietly make judgements on the performances of others. I was hoping they would be short and sweet but this wasn’t quite what happened. The Best Woman's speech was beyond reproach, but then she is female. P’s speech was heartfelt but due to his insistence on mentioning everyone who was present, it went on a bit – and even then he forgot to mention his university friends and quickly added them in just before the toast. He wouldn’t let me see or hear his speech before the event, but when I saw the number of A4 sheets he took out of his pocket, my heart sank! 

He’d been worried that the suit he’d worn for the wedding would now, eight months later, be too tight but in fact he just squeezed into it. However, after his pie and sticky toffee pudding, the waistcoat was rather tight so, as he stood up to deliver his speech, he unbuttoned it, saying ‘If wearing an unbuttoned waistcoat is good enough for Art Garfunkel, it's good enough for me’. Later, the Best Woman –  who was sitting opposite him –  told me that his fly was partially open, so it looked as if he was deliberately exposing himself to the guests, possibly as a form of performance art. I don’t think many people noticed, however.

The MC made the biggest impression. I have to say that he was brilliant at greeting the guests, taking their coats, liaising with the staff, keeping things moving and chatting to people, and we are both very grateful to him for this. Before the meal, his impromptu shoe-exploding act was pure genius (the heels of his Ecco shoes spontaneously fell off, quite spectacularly, something we later discovered happens to around 1% of Ecco shoes due to something called Hydrolysis, and it even happened to someone at a swish do where Joe Biden was a guest, apparently, so the MC is in good company). However, it did mean he had to spend the remainder of the evening walking round more or less in his socks. We suggested he might craft makeshift heels out of Pontefract Cakes [licorice] stuck on with sticky toffee pudding, but he didn’t seem convinced.

          His own speech was more 1970s Working Men’s Club than 2022 Wedding Reception, but it was nice of him to have put in so much effort. At one point he pretended he’d got a call from the owner of The Spencer Arms (where the venue was) and he left the room, only to return wearing a beret and doing an impersonation of Frank Spencer. Those who remembered the pub was called The Spencer Arms, and who were old enough to remember Michael Crawford’s hapless character, enjoyed this, but many of us were mystified. For younger guests, the impersonation was incomprehensible as they had no idea who Frank Spencer was, which in itself actually made many of us feel like dinosaurs from a lost world. And for people like myself who did remember Frank Spencer, but who didn’t make the connection with the pub’s name until some time afterwards, it seemed like a rather random and bewilderingly outdated character to impersonate. However, the MC’s speech will go down in everyone’s memory as a highlight of the evening. Personally, I know I’ll remember the exploding shoes with fondness for many years to come. 

Check out Carole and Jude's article about their experiences in Barnsley [below]