Almost all the arrangements made now. I popped into town to pick up my three-piece suit, realising only as I put it on that if I had left it til tomorrow as I had considered then the shop would have been shut for the Bank Holiday. Although my diet went a bit out of the window in the last month of touring I seem to have pulled it back this week and everything was fitting well - the trousers were, if anything, a little loose. I did up the bottom jacket of my suit and the tailor looked at me as if I had just napalmed a primary school. "You never do up the bottom button," he informed me.
"Wouldn't it be easier just not to put the bottom button on in that case?" I asked him.
I don't think he was impressed. But now I know how to be cool.
I have never had a suit made especially before me (this is an incredibly generous wedding gift), but I could get used to it. It makes the off the peg suits that I wear on stage feel a little bit like something I've bought for £5 from a charity shop. But I can't be allowed to have nice things. This thing will be coated in Marmite by the end of the wedding. Even though there is no Marmite on the wedding breakfast (that's what dinner is called once you're married apparently) or probably in the hotel. My Marmite homing instincts will make sure that the suit is dripping with Marmite by the end of the night. Lucky I got a black suit, with a dripping cloth effect.
I had a few more wedding related things to do and ended up walking the length of Oxford St, getting sweaty, before realising I was in serious danger of not making it to Oxford in time for tonight's tour gig (the tour was booked in before the wedding - I might have had the week off if we'd done it the other way round). Plus the Bank Holiday weekend was in danger of creeping up and ambushing me again. Would I get caught in traffic with people trying to escape to their families?
I was lucky as it turned out, so far the sit-com wedding booby traps have all failed to fire and I got into town without any problems. But maybe it's the big changes about to kick in or maybe it's just the passing of the years, but I found driving past my old haunts had me almost welling up. Partly, I think, because it was a bit of a punch in the face to realise my time here started over a quarter of a century ago. I drove past Boulter St where I had lived in my last year at University, thinking of the young idiots we were - there's a picture of us somewhere standing outside the house in our dressing gowns. Where did the years go?
The same old memories kept coming back, and I suspect I've written about them before, so it also reminded me of the way my dad would drive through Middlesbrough when we were kids, telling us about the things that happened in a particular place or on a particular corner and we'd all call him boring and tell him we'd heard the stories before.
But nostalgia had my stomach in its fist and was twisting gently. The route through the one-way system of Oxford almost ensured that I saw everything, although I didn't go past the Carfax chippy, where me and my future Best Man would spend morose and boring evenings, before heading across the road to the Mitre, in the hope of meeting women, but in fact just playing fruit machines instead. In fact only I played them, he just watched. Making his life even sadder than mine.
Is time-sickness an actual thing, because I was feeling queasy at the indefatigable march of years that had brought me so rapidly to this point. What is it like to be 70? How hard does bitter sweet nostalgia hit you then? Or have you just forgotten it all by then? I've already forgotten much more than I remember. The montage in my head no doubt becoming a memory of a previous montage rather than the real events, a potato print on it's 25th pressing without fresh application of paint.
My last gig as a single man went fine, though the show seemed like a similarly distant memory in places and my throat was not up to the rigours of performing after only five nights off. It was a warm and friendly crowd and I got many good wishes for my upcoming nuptials, as well as a penis drawn on a napkin. Something for everyone.
So it all kicks off tomorrow, with my Good Friday stag do (I am not saying I am Jesus, that is for other people to say) and I suspect that my blogs on the matter will be postponed (if my new wife allows me to continue blogging at all). It would be a good point to bid you adieu perhaps, but I can't get this close to the decade and stop now. I'll give you a brief and shrouded account of proceedings when I can and hope that the rubbish sit-com writers who script my life are away at their families for Easter this weekend. But if they're not there might be a show in all of this. But who will get to do it? Me or Mrs Herring?
