Primal Scream

Today we are honoured and excited to be featured on the splendiforous Any Other Wedding, screaming at our own wedding cake. Go see, and go read all the other loveliness that is there. These are awesome ladies.

Meet Our Furry Child

I think it's only right I should introduce you to the third member of our little family.

What me? I would NEVER do a wee up the side of your record collection!

This is Granville, and he is Sam's fluffy little cat.

He is very small, for a cat, and rather camp. He spends a lot of time grooming himself and posing, like a dapper little dandy boy. He sticks his nose in the air if he comes across anything he doesn't like. This includes any brand of cat food less extortionately expensive than Whiskas.

I didn't like cats that much when I started going out with Sam. I was well and truly a dog person. You know where you are with a dog, all bouncy and friendly and reliant. I couldn't work out for the life of me why Sam had a cat especially one that A. wasn't that cute and B. appeared to have a stick up his arse when it came to making friends with humans.

Daddy's favourite little munchkin, kissy kissy kiss (G not looking impressed)

So Granville and I had a bit of a stand-off for a good year before he finally decided he would grace my lap with his furry bottom and start purring. Then, as I would be merrily walking by, he started inexplicably rolling over onto his back in front of me and waving his paws in the air, blocking my path. Most inconvenient. Did he realise how ridiculous he looked, I wondered? Then he began springing out from behind pieces of furniture as I was walking by, grabbing onto my leg with his paws, as if I was some sort of prey. "Do you know how ridiculous you look?" I would say. Then he would skulk off, sheepishly, as if suddenly realising the folly of his ways.

Cats are strange. But Granville clearly thought I was a bit odd too. And maybe he was right. So grudgingly we built our own strange sort of loving friendship. The sort of friendship where I'd get up far too early and he'd come and fall asleep on the sofa on me while I was listening to techno (just the kind of thing you do at 6am) and I would switch on the webcam and make little films of him doing hilarious cat raving, paws aloft. And he really didn't seem to mind at all.

Now sometimes Granville would rather sit on me than Sam. I expect this is probably because I am a bit squidgier than Sam, but Sam still takes it a bit personally.

Hopefully this swaying of feline favouritism has finally prompted my husband to declare that I am now his best friend (how d'ya like that, kittypants?) and not Granville, as previously implied over the years.

Sorry G, you may be cute and fluffy, but I don't shit in the vegetable patch.

Love you really fluffy cutiekins, (now that we've finally sorted out the will...)

Scrambled Heads

We are back, but I think at least half of our brains are still in the Garden.

So I am forced to do a list post. Unable to form proper sentences.

BEST BITS:

-Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Best act hands down. EVEN BETTER THAN BLONDIE. A 70 year old woman in gold sequinned trousers looking like a goddess and belting out one Motown gem after another. I loved them so much I bounced like a zebedee through the whole thing. And I think I may have fan-girl screamed a bit too much for everyone around me.

-Random Kigu abuse... by the Sunday night we were all so tired we just started pushing them over and calling them names. I know it's not behaviour becoming of gardeners, but really they were EVERYWHERE. Make your own costume, you lazy trendy people. We were a bit naughty to be honest. But we're northerners, if we didn't do this to the southern softies, they'd all be disappointed. Honest they would.

-Sam took all the leftover postcards from the wedding and wrote challenges on the back of them for strangers to do. The man in the Chai Wallah tent who took off all his clothes and put them on backwards (INCLUDING HIS WELLIES) was my hero.

-We had kazoos as part of our Saturday wasp costumes. You would be AMAZED how many people think you can just blow down a kazoo and a noise will come out. They must have had WASTED childhoods.

-Husband festival Sam is much more brilliant than Boyfriend festival Sam. We didn't lose him once - first year ever. He just wanted to cuddle me and show off his new wife to all his new festival friends. SQUEEE.

 Wasp husband falls asleep on his own bottom

Off Down The Rabbit-Hole

Have a wonderful weekend, whatever you may be doing.

See you on Monday

Love from

The Bad Penny xxxx

PS. Think I've finally fixed the comments. Who knows! Give it a go and see what happens... ;)

For Better Or For Lost

It's no secret that my Sammy likes a tipple at a festival. But, unlike the rest of us, when he starts drinking he can get a bit over-excited. Suddenly, we all look around and he is gone.

Where does Sam go?

To Planet Sam.

Sam can disappear onto Planet Sam for up to eight hours at festivals - not so good when your friends are spending that whole time looking for you. It gets  to the point where we know if he goes off to the toilet or for a cigarette by himself, he just won't come back. X hours later he rolls into the tent at 5am, completely oblivious and says (affronted) "Where were YOU LOT then?"

And everybody wants to punch him.

Last year, I had a GREAT IDEA.

I dressed as Little Bo Peep, and we dressed Sam as a sheep, with a great big tag around his neck with his name on, saying "If Found, Please Return To Bo Peep".

It didn't work. Everybody thought it was a joke. He still wandered off, and we still couldn't find him anywhere.

"I'm hiding in here, playing with my balls!"

The thing is with my darling husband is, he LOVES an audience. And he knows the four of us have heard it all before, many, many times.  But to a group of wide-eyed, Southern, hip young things at a boutique festival, this foghorn of a Yorkshireman (who has just pinched their acoustic guitar and started bellowing out "Your Mum's fallen in the water/ Your Mum's fallen in the sea/ Your Mum cannot speak properly/ And she smells of wee BOOM BOOM BOOM") is like the perfect Out-There Secret Garden experience. He gets rapturous applause. I've seen it happen.

 Sam as PC Primark of the Fashion Police, making a very public arrest for offensive use of dungarees

I did actually wonder how well I might handle this now we're husband and wife. Before, although I loved him just as dearly, there was always an element of "oh well, if he falls off the Pagoda into the lake it's his own stupid fault" in amongst the anxiety.

But now I am MARRIED to a drunken runaway mine train I feel like I have this responsibility to actually keep him in line. Plus I will feel genuinely sad if I go to a festival and don't see him all weekend.

Then I had a Eureka moment.

Booze + Sam = No Brain. If I could somehow STEM the flow of alcohol into his brain, I could possibly contain this rampant subconscious Bono-like desire to hold court with randoms. Perhaps I could even keep him in his more rational mind until, I dunno, at least 1am.

Answer?

I keep hold of ALL our money.

If he leaves the source of money, he leaves the source of beer. He will have to return to base camp in order to replenish his Lager Level. And if he gets drunk and wanders off? He'll be forced to sober up and come home.

IT CAN'T FAIL.

Mind you, we said that last year about Bo Peep.

So if my mission is thwarted, and you're going to the Secret Garden Party this year and you stumble across a man who looks a bit like this....

Please tell him he's a married man now, and he needs to go and find his wife.

I will be eternally grateful.

Sam's Tips On How It Feels To "Do A Marry"

Yesterday we had an utterly BRILLIANT day at the Out Of Spite Festival. OOS is small weekend fest in Leeds with a load of shouty bands, and hundreds of people from all over the country who have been meeting up and growing old together over the last twelve years or so. And as we all get fatter and greyer, a lot of us are starting to get married.

My husband loves to drink lager and dispense wisdom. So, with his new expertise in the field of marriage, he delighted in rolling round letting everybody know Exactly What To Expect.

(gleaned from yesterday's monologues to old friends in various stages of engagement)

"It will be a montage! The whole day will just go by like fucking hell! And the night before you'll think - well, I'm getting married, but I still feel a bit normal - and you'll have some bubbles and you'll go to bed... and the next day you'll wake up and think 'well, this is normal' and you'll get dressed in some nice clothes and then you'll get to the altar and you'll be waiting and all of sudden you'll be like .... fucking hell this is horrible! And it'll just hit you like WOAHHH and it'll be ARGGGG and then all of a sudden she'll be there and you'll be so relieved and it's like THANK GOD..... but that's when everything starts happening all at once and it's like a montage and it all rushes by LIKE A MONTAGE and there are all these people and you'll think, well I'm having an AWESOME time but I don't really know what's going on and then there's all this food you've been really excited about eating but you don't eat any of it and you drink loads but you don't feel pissed you just feel like WOAHHH this is like a MONTAGE.... and then the next day you wake up and think.... *exhales heavily* ...WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED??"

"WTF? I did a marry!"

Weddings As A Spectator Sport

Ever since our wedding day, I have been nagged for photographs.

The worst offenders have been the staff and members at my part-time job. Most of them are 50 +, and all of them women. If there was a demographic likely to be nosey curious about a wedding, people, this is it.

Yesterday I took in a photoshopped collage of official pictures Sam had put together and put it up in reception, in the hope that it would finally shut them up. Knowing full well they were presuming a "proper" wedding, with a beautiful elegant dress and lots of pretty "wedding things".

I put on my best thick skin, just for the occasion.

I felt like our wedding was in a cage at the zoo, ready for people to point and stare at.

"It's a short dress!" they cried, and then "I never though I'd see a bride wearing plimsolls!" followed swiftly by, "Is this what they call 'funky'?"

I was surprised, actually (knowing some of the members quite well) which of them seemed perplexed, which were polite but incredibly sniffy, and the tiny minority who seemed genuinely excited and wowed by it being so different. Needless to say the reaction of those last few just made my day and made me feel tough enough to not care about the others.

I knew I would find it difficult getting reactions from people who don't really know me very well. It does make me a tiny bit sad that I was put under so much pressure to bring in anything at all. But as a happy, peppy gym instructor, you can't be cagey. Holding back photos for a WHOLE month (in spite of bringing them cake!!) is an action at odds with the open, cheerful person I am at work. Consequently I think some people thought I was ashamed of our wedding. And I DEFINITELY wasn't - far from it. I just knew that not everybody would "get" it. I needed to put some distance between myself and the emotion of the day, so I could deal with the inevitable snooty remarks that were bound to pop out (EDIT: although, again, I wasn't expecting some of the lovely things people did say - those who were genuinely interested rather than just rubbernecking for the sake of gym gossip - and hearing those kind words made me really happy that I did bring the pictures in eventually. God I'm a sensitive little muppet)

I suppose it's made me realise how such an enormous part of my main job - being a personal trainer and fitness instructor - is about listening to others and forgetting myself. So much so that these people I see every day really know nothing about me at all. And I quite like that.

Anyway, yesterday I was so swept up in this new spirit of self-expression, I went straight to the hairdressers and got pinked up ready for the Secret Garden Party next week.

Guess this will take the heat off our wedding pictures for a while....