Pro tip: always taster test the wedding food
15.06.15, 3:00 pm

I had all of last week off as annual leave and it was bloody fantastic. Hanging about the house on my own all day is no chore when it’s beautiful sunshine outside and you’ve got a fridge full of fun food. Speaking of food, we went to the Millennium Galleries on Tuesday to do our food tasting for the wedding, where you basically get to pick two potential starters, mains and desserts to try out. And thank GOD this perk exists, as one of the starters we considered genuinely tasted terrible – a sort of smoked salmon and cream cheese thing, which was fine, except lurking underneath was some cucumber that had been pickled in Satan Juice. Oh my days, it was so bad. We still ate it all though, because despite the fact that we’re paying these people thousands and thousands of pounds for the privilege of having our wedding in their room, we’re so incredibly British and polite that to not clear the plate would be an insult. So despite it tasting like poison we forced it down, and then didn’t mention it to the chef guy when he came out to chat to us about the food. Maybe it was some kind of trick, and afterwards all the chefs stood in the kitchen laughing, going, “Wow, they still ate that cucumber despite us splashing on the Hell Gravy? OK, now get their beef main and make the Yorkshire pudding out of boiled cat scrotum and see if they’ll eat that. Idiots.”

So anyway, we’ve picked the food and hopefully it’ll be fine. And we’ve sorted out the timings for the day, so that stress ball has been swallowed successfully. Chat then moved on to room decorations and a familiar lurch of panicked horror, as we discovered that we have to actually provide our own decorations, and so now a new stress ball has formed and is sitting impatiently in my stomach. Later on, James pulled a few I-don’t-know faces and then just said, ‘Mmm, decorations and stuff just isn’t really my thing”, and then gave me a look that clearly said, “It’s now officially your thing, on account of you having tits”. I promptly texted Mel for advice, solely due to her being JCR Decorations Officer for 9 months when we were in halls, although memories of that time seem to consist of all us housemates being roped into sponging poor-quality brick prints onto cardboard sheets for a castle-themed halls ball and hating life. She’s going to ring me on Thursday, hopefully with the offer of sorting it all out. You can but hope.

Saw Ju on Monday and went to Nando’s with her wee bambina. She’s very cute and very well behaved, and of course I took the opportunity of trolling James with photos of her lying on our rug playing with a cuddly giraffe, but you can’t quite escape the fact that they don’t really do a great deal in the early months. I had a half chicken at Nando’s and didn’t regret it one bit, despite taking quite a long time to shovel it down. James has started talking about getting a bigger car that you can get a baby into. It feels slightly claustrophobic to know that your life and choices are theoretically completely mapped out for the next 18 months. Hey ho.

Still haven’t rung Dad, despite it being… a very long time since I last spoke to him. Really need to as well, as Amanda’s daughter’s horrible wedding is fast approaching. Oh, and I’ve decided to not give a wedding speech after all that. It was all fun and exciting and everything, but then I had a palpitaty evening at the weekend and realised it would be a mistake. My heart is already going to be a frickin’ nightmare for the day, and so antagonising it with wedding speech nerves feels like an error of judgement. It’s a real shame, and I know in an ideal world I should be mega brave and power through the palpitations and hideousness, but I’d just rather not. I’m already quite worried about how my heart will cope on the day as it is, so limiting the stress feels like the thing to do. Sorry feminism, I’m afraid I can’t pull off this particular gesture.

Finding out on Wednesday whether or not our grant application has been accepted, and therefore whether or not I’ll have a job after this year. Everyone’s twitchy and anxious at work, yet pretending it’s going to be fine. It makes me long for the sunny garden again.

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