“Thank you everyone for being here today. It truly means the world to me for you all to come and join us on this special occasion. I'm not going to speak on behalf of my new incredibly beautiful wife because I'm not stupid enough to get married and have her file for a divorce all on the same day. We tossed a coin to see who goes first with the speeches and she won and said that I had to go first so here I am doing as I'm told. Yes, I know it's a first before any of you smart arses shout it out. I want to say a special thank you to my older brother Sean and to my now sister in law Phillipa for helping bring us together.”
I turn to look at Phillipa who clearly knows where I'm about to go with this and she looks at me with pleading eyes, begging me without words not to tell the story of how I met her sister and her key part in the tale. I turn back to the guests and ask “Has everyone heard the story of how we met?”
This question was met with a cross volley of yes’s and no’s, a voice from the back shouts a thousand times to which someone follows with a tell it again. I turn to Phillipa and she's now shaking her head vehemently from left to right so I turn back again and ask “should I tell it? Make some noise if you want to hear it!”
“TELL IT, TELL IT…” the chant goes up around the room and poor Phillipa looks crestfallen.
“Sorry Phillipa, you've got to give the people what they want.”
I make a downward motion with my open hands to quieten everyone down, take a cough to clear my throat and glance at my new wife who nods her head at me as if giving a permission I wasn't asking for but I'll let her think I was and I begin the story of how we met.
“I think most of you here will know Sean’s beautiful and amazing husband John who I love and adore like a brother,” I raise my glass in their direction, “salut!” to which they both return the gesture.
“Well long before they were married and I'm going to take you all back to a time they'd only been seeing each other a couple of months, Sean takes his hick kid brother, that would be me folks, out of the countryside in which we grew up and into the big city they call London. Now I don't know if you've ever been to Norfolk before but there aren't many virgins there, mainly on account of most people have already slept with their siblings before the age they can leave home. You all thought the six toes thing was a joke. Well there's a biological reason for that, see if you can figure it out… anyways, that day the village was missing two idiots and no one had put out a search party or if they had they didn't say anything when we got home and no one looked miffed that they'd been out combing the fields all day searching so it was all good. We'd caught the train from Norwich. Now this might be hard to believe but there was a lady on the train selling stuff from a cart going down the middle. It was like a newsagent on wheels, just less newspapers. I was all in for two Kit Kat's until she told me that'll be four quid and I said there's Norfolk N Way I'm paying four quid for two Kit Kat's you can get… It's OK Aunty Barbara I said Norfolk N Way. I didn't swear.”
Aunty Barbara sticks two fingers up at me. “No Aunty Barbara they were four finger Kit Kat's, Jesus woman I must have told you this story before. Please excuse my Aunty Barbara, she's got six toes. Anyways we finally get to London Town. Jesus it's big isn't it? Every road runs pretty much the same length as the entire village we'd spent our childhoods in. There's hundreds of people all around you and they're all tutting and swearing at us two idiots as we're swimming in the history of it all just looking at these huge buildings like two goldfish,” and I mime what a goldfish would look like looking around wide eyed with my mouth open and shutting.
“I think we thought we were going to hop off the train and to the left would be the Houses of Parliament, to the right the Tower of London and in front of us, I don't know … Trafalgar Square. Well… it turns out we were wrong. I mean what are the chances of two halfwits from Norfolk not knowing that London really is huge? I don't know hey. So we pick a direction and we start walking and we've probably been going for a good half hour. We've seen nothing apart from cafes with prices that made me wish I'd brought those Kit Kat's after all. How many fingers Aunty Barbara?”
She puts her glass down on the table in front of her and gives the V with both hands.
“Round of applause for Aunty Barbara and her short term memory folks! So much better than her long term one clearly,” and everyone duly joins in clapping and laughing.
“So we've seen nothing in that direction and we start walking in another, then another and basically we're now well and truly lost. So Sean being the older and more sensible of the two of us decides to go ask someone for help. Please bear in mind that myself and my now wife have been living in sin for about twenty years now and we've only now gotten married because she discovered there were tax benefits. Personally I did it for love but you can't look a gift horse in the mouth. Basically I'm saying this so you all know that the smartphones you're all recording this speech on, well we didn't have those back in the day and as I said earlier neither of us realised how big London is and we can't just open our phone and look on Google maps. So Sean spots what he assumes to be the most sympathetic face in the crowd and we start walking over to these two girls in their late teens. Sean goes to the nearest one to ask for directions and without him even saying a single word, she goes I've got a boyfriend like so you can fuck off mate to which he replies without missing a beat oh good that makes two of us, actually me and my brother, we're lost and we were hoping you could help us with directions. Now at this point most of you will probably have ascertained by the amount of warmth now in this room being generated by Phillipa's radiating cheeks who the person who said it was. Those of you not from Norfolk will have managed to deduce a la Sherlock Holmes who the other of the two girls was. Here's a clue, it's the lady to my right who is doubled over with tears rolling down her face laughing and about to fall off her chair. I'd continue the story and try to describe what her reaction was like at the moment but I don't need to when you can get a first hand visual of it. She wasn't wearing the wedding dress that day though folks I have to say. Now the only difference I remember from that day is that she spat her mouthful of drink about twelve foot in front of her in this glorious arc, narrowly missing some poor gentleman by about an inch. I really wish I could say he's been waiting patiently behind the door at the back of the room to come in and say hello but we couldn't find him.”
Cue groans of disappointment from the audience. “This is why panto works so well in the UK people's. It's like a national sport. So as you can see my now wife thought that was the funniest shit she had ever heard. Oops sorry Aunty Barbara. Now me being from Norfolk I'm obviously attuned to women making funny noises and having tears rolling down their eyes with zero levels of compassion and empathy for their siblings and I thought this is the girl I want to spend the rest of my life with. Phillipa I'm sorry but I'm eternally grateful to you if that makes you feel any better right now? Your cheeks look a little flush there by the way. I'm also really sorry that the relationship didn't work out. We may not have found the man that nearly got hit by the flying drink that day but we did manage to track down your boyfriend from that time, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together and show some appreciation for David…” and I point to the door. The look of fear on Philippa's face is priceless. As the advert says, for everything else there's MasterCard. I fear that joke may have caused the death of my new wife though who is now on the floor holding her stomach in quite considerable pain unable to control her laughter. Phillipa’s face convinces me that she believes looks can kill.
“What are you angry with me for?” I ask her shrugging my shoulders, tilting my head to the left and holding my hands upright in front of me like I'm de Niro in Goodfellas about to say some clichéd line like hey, forget about it. “You were the one that said it and God bless you for thinking every man that talks to you wants to get inside your knickers, even the gay ones. Hey big round of applause for Phillipa and Sean please everyone…”
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