Anyhoo (yes "anyway" was already taken).

One advantage of staying in a household with a distantly/imminently impending wedding is the ability to be stuck for reading materials in the loo and so chance upon a copy of Martha Stewart Weddings: full of things one would never think of.

Favourite so far is the suggestion to have mini ring doughnuts hooplaed around the spoons served in the coffee. Firstly serving anything with an implement already in it is a little odd - when was the last time a restaurant impaled your knife and fork in the mashed potato like a scale model for some plaza art, or possibly evil Edna meeting the fate of the Wicked Witch of the West? Secondly, what's wrong with the coffee that it needs stirring, or are they presuming that all will be adding sugar or taking it white? Thirdly, the spoons are now irksomely sticky and greasy thereby turning the reception into a greasy spoon affair. Fourthly, there'll be retrieving sunken doughnut chaos within minutes. Fifthly, to slide the ring off the possibly phallic finger of handle in a rather inappropriate or only too appropriate gesture depending on one's default state of mind given the slipping on of a ring earlier (and is using one's hands to remove food from cutlery not just perverse?), or to attempt dental piñata-age as the traditional kebab method meets gravity and a lack of friction all while dripping coffee all over the namechecking napkins? Sixthly, coffee and doughnuts at a wedding - this the Simpson-Wiggum ceremony? Seventhly, ring doughnuts are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord (oh, and me) as the whole point of them is the cunning required to contain the jam (or find it depending on supermarket).

So I'm left wondering how much further through this trove of unknown unknowns I'll have to flick before I find the suggestion that guests should be seated according to the dominant colour of their outfit (hey, it works for DVDs).

No wonder the woman has problems getting her tax returns in on time as she probably spends her entire life sewing pomegranate arils to the edge of a leather picture frame before gluegunning fertilised quail eggs jauntily in the corners.

So in other news I've been flitting back and forth a bit, as Flickr probably attests. This has included finding myself crying in Regent's Park with about three other tearjerked all visible. Helpfully two women with burbling prams of joy decided to treat each maudlinist as a mark and so tack merrily about them. Such rubbing-it-in kindness. More on this story later. If I remember.

According to last.fm Madonna and Muse are joint first in my all-time listening ranking. Turns out that oddly if I find myself mostly using computers without last.fm on, or using one of those quaint hi-fi stereo wireless thingies (complete with audio cassette magnetism-sound conversion facilities), the music listened to through those doesn't get logged. Hence Madonna's sudden surge is purely a response to being becalmed in a sea of guitars for a fortnight, thanks to a borrowed music collection that is in the words of Travis on their nearly-bought first album, so the one before they became popular, tied to the nineties.

Admittedly I may be too as I've just worked out what grates during that 4 minutes of tedium thing; the syllables 'Craig David' would fit all too well in it. Whatever became of... heck, I can even be bothered to think of a disparaging description of him, that's how little I rate him.

Anyway, this slightly odd, disjointed thing is precisely what it appears: a half written post with notes tacked on the end that then were swiftly expanded. Guess who found the paragraph of notes that failed to get expanded to three of prose somewhere deep in his dissertation. I think that's what comes of trying to read it. I haven't read it before*. It was too painful. And a tad too long. I suppose it was about 10,000 over the upper guideline (if I don't call it a limit it wasn't a limit, right?).

* I meant after handing it in, but I really can't remember reading it before the deadline. Possibly this is where I went wrong. Although I did proofread it, just evidently not well enough on an hour-and-a-half of sleep a night for as long as I could then remember, which admittedly may not have been all that long as everything got a bit confusing after a while, including not being sure if I was awake or had just dreamed getting up at four again. Turns out I need sleep; whodathunkit?

Oh, and for future reference, when in a situation where one hopes to impress, in which the tome has been discussed, and having been informed at the end by the impressee that he would like to read a copy sometime, do not reply "Oh God, no, don't do that; it's dire". I like to think his expression showed he was impressed with my honesty and objectivity. I also still wonder what had made the other people in the park cry.

Anyhoo,

PS. There's only one decent dress in the thing and I don't mean the thing I had to get bound at seven in the morning in Hammersmith, although that could probably benefit from an un-meringue or two.

PPS. The SIL has asked my mother along to help choose the dress. Ignoring whatever nefarious power games underlie this, the thought is far, far too amusing, although it would probably be prudent of me not to explain why. And why are prudent and prurient so similar? That prepenultimate sentence gets a little strange when dyslexia strikes.