Have you ever watched TV’s The Good Wife? I have. Bones? The Mentalist? My Big Fat Gipsy Wedding? Steps: (How We Moaned Our Way Through) The Reunion? I’ve seen them all. Regularly. Time after time after time after time. The thing is, I don’t like any of these programmes, but night after night I sit and watch them with the future Mrs T.
I don’t actually mind, I’m generally blogging or working away on the laptop while she watches, and after a while you become strangely entranced in finding out what Claire from Steps is going to find to complain about this week. Anyway, if I’m honest there’s very little on TV that I’m actually interested in watching…
As of Friday though there is DEFINITELY something else on! The Euros have kicked off and, like bedraggled grooms across the country, I am desperate to see just how spectacularly England can fail to win! COME ON ENGLAND!!! So, after years without a mere whiff of the TV remote now, my fellow Grooms, is OUR time!
Naturally, at such a time I expect my old friend the remote to be immediately surrendered. This is, after all, merely a short tournament; a brief three weeks of decent TV amongst a year long sea of whatever (ahem) rubbish she wants to put on the box. My need is greater, a tournament like this only comes around every couple of years, and last time (lest we forget) England weren’t even in the tournament. A successful marriage as we all know is built on understanding and compromise, so where is the TV remote? You guessed it… firmly in the grasp of my darling Bride!
Interestingly I’ve noticed that I’m never actually refused the chance to watch the match. It may occasionally be slightly delayed by an hour or so whilst she “just watches the end of this” (it is nearly over after all) or, more often than not, the remote is thrust a little too firmly in my direction along with the customary sigh or raised eyebrows that just seem to scream “if you really loved me you wouldn’t make me watch this…”
The newest tactic employed this weekend is the strategic deployment of wedding plans. For the past few weeks our plans for the wedding had been progressing slower than a lackadaisical tortoise with a gammy knee. However, since turning on the footy I find myself constantly presented with invitation designs, table plans, pictures of flowers, all manner of groomsmen attire and a plethora of emails to our foreign suppliers that I urgently need to translate into Spanish. Oddly enough all of these tasks seem designed to take roughly 90 minutes to complete and I am allowed to rest only for about quarter of an hour, during which time we generally flick to another channel… for the next 45 minutes. It also seems a bizarre coincidence that all of these tasks are now extremely urgent, despite being ignored completely for several months… suspicious much?!
Unbeknownst to Dom however, back in the changing rooms I’ve been at the blackboard devising a brand new defensive strategy. She commented the other day that I had been doing stirling work over the past few weeks in teaching Small Dog not to bark all the time. The truth is that actually I’ve been training him to bark only at specific moments, namely whenever the football’s on and he notices an angry bride approaching. We’ve come to an agreement whereby, for a reasonable quantity of chicken, my furry friend will put aside our differences and indicate strongly to his mistress his urgent need for a walk. The plan seemed worthy of Ferguson himself, although Paddington’s insistence on payment in advance has led to one or two teething problems. With England’s first game kicking off soon though the fridge is full of beer and the oven will be rammed full of juicy chickens…this HAS to work!!!
So good luck to England but, more importantly good luck to any like-minded grooms banned from watching it! We WILL be victorious!
The pundits pre-match predictions?
Bride 1-0 Groom
I can’t help feeling that Small Dog is in with a definite chance of winning this tournament!
