It all started to go horribly wrong as soon as I walked into the hotel.
The thing was that I didn't so much 'walk into' the hotel. I walked round it. And then I walked into it. Through a side door. The swanky main entrance was closed. For renovations. No-one had told me about the renovations. Nor had anyone told me that the renovations that no-one had told me about involved industrial jack-hammering to remove the marble. All day. All day. From 8am til 6pm.
And so began the story of our wedding. The worst day ever.
Describing your wedding day as 'the worst day ever' is a big call. You have to be really sure. To avoid hyperbole and accusations of over-dramatising things, you have to flick back through as many bloody awful days as you can remember, and then be able to write in your blog and with your hand placed firmly on your heart, that your wedding day - your wedding day for god's sake! - was the worst day you've ever had.
It was.
Hand on heart. Firmly. It really was. Hands down. No debate.
It was a complete disaster from start to finish. Actually, it was a complete disaster from pre-start to post-finish. It was a comedy of errors. A story of stuff-ups. A diary of disasters. I kid you not. I dare you to read this and conclude otherwise. You won't. You'll agree that my wedding day was the worst day I've ever had. And that's without you knowing any other bad days I might have had.
You'll finish reading this and you'll be mightily relieved that my wedding day wasn't your wedding day. At times you'll think that I'm exaggerating stuff, or making it up. I'm not, I promise.
This is all true. I guarantee it. Or your money back. Pity I couldn't get my money back!
I'll get the preliminaries out of the way very quickly. I'm pretty sure you don't want to hear the preliminaries. You want juice. Gossip. Dirt. Trust me, you'll get it. But I need to set the scene, so please bear with me for the briefest of moments.
The Preliminaries
Me and Picky were living out our lives quite happily in Sydney. Our 'de facto' status was causing us no trouble at all. But when you've met the love of your life - the one person you know you're gonna be with forever - you really may as well get hitched. For no other reason than Picky would get a nice ring and we might get a nice salad bowl or two. So, one winter whilst we were skiing in Queenstown, I popped the question.
& then I did something that I would caution all blokes to take note of - I convinced Picky that a winter wedding in Europe would be romantic.
Note to self (and to all other blokes in the known Universe): Never - and I do mean never - think that you know more about a) weddings, or b) romance, than the woman you love. You don't and you never will. I didn't. But I didn't know it. I was about to find out the hard way. The very hard way.
A winter wedding in Europe. Picky was immediately sceptical. She wanted a hot, sunny, summer wedding. In Sydney. Her home. Our home.
It wasn't to be. The thing is that I can be a real convincing so-and-so when I want to be. It's been said that I can sell ice to the eskimos. I'm not sure about that. But I did somehow manage to 'sell' a winter wedding in Europe to Picky. The ice and those bloody eskimos will crop up again later, I promise you.
A winter wedding in Europe!
It certainly had its upsides, it really did. My family and friends in the UK could come. Picky's family and friends in Germany could come. We'd just had Pearl, so everyone in Europe would get to meet her. We could 'do' Xmas in Germany. Plus I painted a perfect picture of a crisp, cool Winter's day with the sun low in the sky and a light dusting of fluffy snow on the ground. Ice to eskimos, ice to eskimos. Picky agreed.
The nitty gritty of Our Big Day looked like this -
Wedding date
2pm on Saturday 18th December 2010
Our Wedding
Wedding party to stay at The Intercontinental, Park Lane, London
Official Ceremony at Islington Registry Office, Islington High Street
Private champagne ride on The London Eye
Wedding reception a Theo Randall's @ The Intercontinental, Park Lane
Wedding breakfast the next day for all guests in the world-famous Cookbook Cafe @ The Intercontinental, followed by a walking tour of the famous London sights
That was the plan.
And believe me, it was planned. Meticulously. Down to music that we would enter Islington Registry Office to (Florence & the Machine, You've got the Love).
If I was to pop a marketing spin on my own wedding - as I'm prone to do with these things - I would say that we billed it as 'a romantic winter wedding in London surrounded by the European people we love'.
The Thursday before our wedding. D-day. Disaster Day.
So, I walked into the hotel via what was effectively a side-door and my first thought was that the place had been bombed. It genuinely looked like a bomb had hit it. Just hit it. The beautiful marble atrium and reception area that we had seen on the internet was a scene of utter devastation and total chaos. It turned out that the beautiful marble atrium and reception area was being converted into a stunning non-marble atrium and reception area. That would be ready in a month. For now there wasn't an atrium. Or a reception area. But there was noise. Real, proper noise. To remove marble you need a jackhammer or two. Or 50. It was basically a building site. It was the venue for our wedding reception.
O yes and the world-famous Cookbook Cafe - the place we had booked (yes, booked) for 20 people on the morning after our wedding - was closed because of the renovations. Or because a bomb had hit the hotel.
Thank heavens that Picky wasn't with me. She would have been devastated if she'd have seen the beautiful hotel that we had booked reduced to this, a deafening building site. Picky's devastation was coming, of course, but for now my wife-to-be was in Germany with her parents.
Picky had gone to Germany with Pearl a week before our wedding day. She wanted to spend some quality time with her folks before she got hitched. I had 'wedding stuff' to do in London. She was due to fly back to London with her folks on the Thursday evening. Two days before our wedding day. I would meet them all off the plane at Stansted Airport.
On Thursday - the Thursday before our wedding on the Saturday - I left 'the building site' and took the train to Stansted Airport. I'd bought a nice bottle of wine (for the girls, excluding Pearl) and some great English beers for the fellas. We could drink it on the train back from the airport to London.
I walked into Stansted Airport. And into pure unadulterated chaos. Chaos. At that precise moment, on that precise Thursday evening, practically every single airport in Western Europe had closed due to heavy snow. As I walked into the Arrivals Hall to meet my future family - with a huge smile and huge bag of booze - all the flight boards flicked around to display one simple word .... CANCELLED. The airport was total bedlam. It was the week before Christmas. More importantly it was 36 hours before my wedding.
& then I remembered something really rather important; I didn't have my phone with me. It was back in the hotel. There were 3million devastated people queueing for the four solitary payphones at Stansted Airport.
When I finally reached the front of the queue and called Picky, she was at Paderborn Airport in the middle of Germany. Paderborn Airport had just been closed down. Their flight had been cancelled and they had been told that Paderborn would stay closed for 'at least a week'. The same applied to every single airport in the whole of Germany. Except one. Dusseldorf.
Dusseldorf is 12hours from Paderborn. By train. By two trains. And a bus.
There was one flight to London from Dusseldorf. It was the next morning at 6am. Picky told me she had to go. It was 6pm. She had a twelve-hour train journey to make. With her parents and a 5-month old baby. She doubted they would make it. And in any case there was every chance that Dusseldorf Airport would be declared closed during those 12 hours.
I put the payphone down.
I found a spare piece of floor in the airport. It was packed with people 'bedding down' for the night, using their luggage as makeshift beds. I opened the bottle of wine. I didn't bother with a glass. The bottle would do just fine. The airport was jam-packed. And noisy. Really, really noisy. It was still a good deal more peaceful than the Intercontinental Hotel, mind you.
I sat alone in the airport drinking red wine from a bottle and I contemplated the cancellation of my wedding day.
That was Thursday. D-Day. Disaster day.
Friday came next. It always does.
And Friday - the day before our wedding day - turned out to be even worse than Thursday. Far worse.
Have a great weekend.
Pip pip
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