2004-06-16 - 4:55 p.m.

Another summer, another glut (or should that be �slew�?) of nuptial shenanigans from my twitching pack of pre-marital friends and acquaintances, all fully ripened couples ready to drop from the tree. In the words of the Billy Ocean song, get out of my dreams, and into that overpriced vintage car driven by a posho stiff in a peaked cap.

These occasions have a variety of implications. Firstly, the attendant stag night and all the beery male bonding that it usually entails. Thankfully, the rampant staggery this year is confined to neighbouring towns, and not far flung corners of the continent,. Not that I�m averse to travelling abroad, but it�s not like these weekends involve much in the way of a vastly different cultural experience, and if you�re going to take in alcohol like a drowning kitten takes in canal, then you may as well be a short train ride away from home, with the added bonus that it doesn�t cost a thrillion pounds for a weekend your only memory of which is putting on your socks of a morning.

Secondly, the wedding gift scenario. Now, I do really like buying gifts for friends, even expensive ones that you have no real choice about buying thanks to wedding lists on a prescriptive par with Schindler's� but a small part of my brain does start to think that since I will never get married, probably never move in to a house that I own and I am unlikely to engage in any of the more dubious present giving occasions (Baptism, Engagement, Job Promotion�yeah, do me a favour), I am unlikely to ever reap the benefits of my friends� collective generosity in the same manner. I need to work on some kind of official status for the �I�m staying single and living in rented property on my own for ever� party, in which people can congratulate me on my life choice, rewarding my decisiveness in any material way they see fit - i.e. offload all the crap that I dished out to them over the years.

The good side is that, having got married, the couples in question do then stop talking about their wedding, because one more conversation involving table flowers when you�re meant to be going to the kitchen and breaking out a bottle of gin and I will start picking people off from the upstairs landing with a sniper�s rifle. I�m sorry, I don�t mean to be disinterested, it�s just that I would sooner gnaw my own face off than deliberate the relative merits of sit down or buffet meal. It�s great you want to talk about it, just do it between yourselves in a hermetically sealed lead container in your basement.

In a twist so ironic it should be an Alanis Morissette song, I recently, in an attempt to have more than fifty pence in my bank account for once in my life, started writing about honeymoon destinations for a wedding mag, so maybe I�m just more sensitive this year.

Idea for short story: Patriotic football fan finds that he can only get sexually aroused when his team crash out of an international competition, and is torn between victory and loss, though in time moves to Albania and raises a large family.