MY chin is like Orion’s Belt.

A load of spots, all in a row, increasing in size as they get nearer my mouth.

Every time I brush my hair, huge clumps of it come out in the brush.

The circles under my eyes have deepened from a muted violet to a deep black.

I awake every morning drenched in sweat, from a night of tossing and turning.

My eyebrows badly need to be tweezed, I’m cultivating a luxurious moustache, my bikini line is threatening to take over down there and as for my shins?

Well, Boy Scouts could get lost in the forest that are my shins.

In short, I have never looked worse.

So much for the glowing bride, huh?

I don’t know if it’s the worry about the big day, or the stress of all the organising still to do – who knew pew ends could cause SO much hassle – but I have totally let myself go.

It could be a bit of the oul reverse psychology – you know, look terrible in the run up to the wedding and have people wondering how you ever landed a man at all at all, then show up on the wedding day looking great and wipe the eyes out of their heads?

Or it could be some sort of natural disaster warning – something big is about to happen to the world, something that only excess body hair and spots will save me from, and my subconscious is preparing me?

The truth of the matter though is that this wedding has become so all-consuming that there isn’t any space left in my brain for anything else, including basic grooming.

It’s all I can think about. And it KILLS me to write that.

I’ll let you in on a little secret – most of this wedding stuff? I don’t care about it! I want it, don’t get me wrong. I want the bells and the whistles and the old, borrowed and blue. But I don’t care about any of it.

Take our cake for example. I don’t care about the cake. I really don’t.

I want one, for the photos and the tradition and mainly because I’m a horse who likes cake. But I don’t CARE about it.

I want a pretty cake, three tiers, bit of ivory icing, ribbon to match our bridal colours. That’ll do.

So why are we spending weeks trawling around bakeries tasting cake and deliberating between cake A and cake B? And wondering is it better to have ivory petals with a lilac centre, or lilac petals with an ivory centre?

This box, this cake box, was ticked 12 months ago. Last year, we booked a cake. We picked one of the first ones we saw, we tasted the cake, we handed over the sponds, and that was that.

Until a couple of weeks ago when our baker let us down and we had to go back to the drawing board (it’s a very long story, trust me, you’d be bored) and start looking at cakes again.

I still don’t care about the cake, but I’m spending a very large amount of time thinking about it. And in case you’re wondering I think we’re going for lilac petals with an ivory centre.

We’re down to 55 days now and all the last-minute stuff is being done  – speeches, gifts for people, menu tasting, making pew ends, organising manicures and church rehearsals – and it seems like every single day there are several things that need to be done, emails that need to be sent, phonecalls that need to be made.

All I think about is the wedding and all I can talk about is the wedding. What am I going to do when it’s all over?

Spontaneously combust, probably.

And that’s the end of this post, because I’m suddenly thinking that ivory petals with a lilac centre would be better.


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