Paper Anniversary

It was our fifth wedding anniversary on the 16th of October. It’s a paper gift kinda anniversary. I hadn’t seen any receipts from Aspreys or the like, no small packages secreted away in Himself’s usual hidey holes so I resigned myself to receiving a toilet roll as a keepsake. Useful I thought, you can never have enough bog roll. Even if you die, someone’s bound to nick it; it will never go to waste. I mean, how many times at work have you done a sprint to the loo in record times that only an Olympic medallist could dream of because you left the call of nature to the last minute and just as you are about to get down to the admin work you realise some light-fingered little toerag has made it away on their toes with the five rolls you saw in there earlier? There is nothing worse than the walk of shame as you shuffle off to another cubicle to remedy your acute distress followed by the need to torture the thieving little git with a shitty stick the next the time you catch them stuffing loo rolls in their oversized designer handbags that should have SWAG printed on the side. So all in all, you can never have too much bog roll I say.

As anniversaries go, it wasn’t all it should have been. Personally, I felt so ill that I should have been on a life support machine but Himself was determined we should go out and celebrate our wondrous union. I argued that being riddled with aches and pains, coughing up a storm and breaking a rib each time was probably going to take the edge off our romantic evening. Shivering like a washing machine on a fast cycle just added to my joy along with a runny nose that was barely contained by a truckload of tissues. I’d have been better off hooking a nosebag over my ears and just letting it run into that. Still, I’ll have the bog roll I thought and so, we reached a compromise and went to the pub up the road. I managed three small glasses of wine, purely medicinal of course, and enjoyed the look on the regulars’ faces as I told them it was swine flu. Hah, you’ve never seen so many backs rapidly disappear since the Great Plague of London. We almost got caught up in the slipstream of hasty exists.

And so it went with a whimper. “Never mind there’s always next year”, I consoled him as I headed off for a hot bath and back to my death bed, too ill to read Frankie Boyle’s autobiography that he’d thoughtfully chosen as my gift, as he knows I love his humour. So what, no bog roll then?

As a husband, Himself is wonderfully attentive and as these last two weeks have trawled by, he has enquired after my health to almost unheard of proportions, so much so, that I mooched off to check that my life assurance policy was still in the filing cabinet and not top-of-the-pile in his briefcase. I needn’t have worried, he still loves me and isn’t ready to dispose of my dismembered body parts quite yet. He was simply making sure I was in the rudest of health for a surprise two day trip to London; a city that I adore and lived in for ten years yet never did the tourist thing. He’s booked a fabulous 4* hotel behind Buckingham Palace, a theatre trip and worked out a wonderfully paced programme of top places to visit. What a catch eh? What a guy. What a totally adorable man.

And so we are off tomorrow morning to just be tourists. I am so excited I could dance, well almost. I can’t be arsed dancing really, never truly felt comfortable doing it. My blood runs cold when I see women dancing barefoot at wedding receptions. The sheer thought of some hefty eejit in stilettos piercing my foot makes me faint. So, as a nod to our wedding day where we didn’t have a ‘first dance’ here’s what himself and me would have looked like if we had. I’m the rotund one. Click here.