Marriage isn't a word...

...it’s a sentence. I’ve just happily served the first 20 years of mine, and don’t require an early release either. There certainly hasn’t been much good behaviour.

To celebrate the remarkable levels of patience and resilience this has required of the ever lovely Mrs G, we are currently residing in a cottage, just over the border in the Yorkshire Dales. Everything currently smells of sausages and woodsmoke, but we won’t go into that right now, just in case the owners are reading this and recognise my name. I’m sure it’ll have worn off by about June.

Having recently enjoyed a roast beef, fried onion and horseradish sauce sandwich I’d gladly have traded my soul for (it’s not worth much – I work in Marketing), I’m now reflecting on 20 happy years of marriage, and we’ve figured out that around 82 days of that have been spent drinking cappuccinos, and a very similar amount of time has involved me standing in shops, nodding thoughtfully at another item of clothing being tried on and saying “It looks great – but what do you think?”

Considering the amount of Star Trek annoyance I’ve subjected her to (new movie is out in May!), and Global Hypercolour fashion errors, I’ve found that the best way to a happy marriage is to regularly say ‘yes’. This is especially applicable to any discussion involving paintings being put up on walls. Remember: It doesn’t matter what you think, and it won’t do you any harm (unless you put a nail through a mains cable), so go with the flow. It’s one less bit of wall to paint too.

Agreeing to more candles is a wise thing also, and you can never have too many off-cuts of fabric tucked away in cupboards. After all, you never know when you might need to whip up yet more cushion covers. Or fashion a makeshift sling after inadvertently saying something without the slightest idea what was wrong with your statement.

Amongst my, not inconsiderable, failings, apparently stealing the duvet is high on the list (claiming you were just keeping it warm doesn’t work, by the way). Some of my hair/beard length experiments haven’t been too popular either, but nature is steadily sorting that one out for me.

Twenty years ago, we thought we were quite cool. Two decades on, I’m happy to admit I know nothing about what’s fashionable any more, and I mostly don’t care either. It really doesn’t matter if your trainers cost £100, or have a trendy badge on the back, if you can’t walk in them or they fall apart quickly.

Much like marriage, you finally realise that what you really need is something that’s comfortable, reliable, and still feels good years later, not some trendy thing that looks great, but turns out to have been based on looks alone, without checking the quality.

It helps to read the label too – I think mine must have mentioned fading somewhere, and the creasing is getting out of control.

Don’t mention the shrinkage either.

This post first appeared in my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on the 5th of April 2013. You can view the edited version used by the paper here. They retitled it '20 years on and still going strong', and moved my title into the opening paragraph. About 30 words were removed, including the whole sentence about making makeshift slings and the very last line. Too cheeky?

From checking my notebook, it seems it's a year this week since the result of the Big Blogger contest, that resulted in me writing this column, was announced. I didn't start writing for the paper until a few weeks later, so that the actual winner could get underway with his first. Next week will be my 50th column. Hence, we're around 24500 words into my journalistic endeavours. Who'd have thunked it?

In a first for me (which shows nicely how behind the times I really am), this one was written and submitted whilst on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales, which seemed pretty damn 'modern' to me. I do have a backup column written, should I be unavoidably detained by life, or poorly, or bereft of ideas. Haven't had to use it. Yet...

(Awesome time-bubble 80s-ness in the headphones at the moment. I own a white label 12" single by Vicious Pink from the mid 80's, and managed to track down a CD with it on by the duo, which arrived this week. In six different mixes. It couldn't come from anywhere other than that timeframe. CCCan't you see?)

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog