Last Christmas Dom and I were presented with a 2000 piece ‘Where’s Wally’ Jigsaw. It drove us completely mental. After being a little bored one day in the post Christmas malaise we thought we’d wile an hour or two away with the puzzling puzzle… 4 days later Wally still hadn’t been located and nor had half the non-Wally containing pieces. It turns out that age 7+ Jigsaws are one of the most difficult challenges facing mankind today. However, this epic, mind-boggling, thrill seeking and above all mildly puzzling task (so much more than just putting small pieces of cardboard into similarly shaped holes) pails in comparison to the gargantuan jigsaw-like puzzle now facing Dom and I.
Over the last year Dom and I have gradually been putting together the parts of our wedding, slowly but surely, one piece at a time. Ok maybe not slowly or surely, more sporadically and in a slightly panicked and frantic state but you get the gist. Anyway, with the wedding nearly upon us we finally have all the pieces and it’s nearly time to put them all into place.
There’s a problem though… someone forgot to give us a box with a picture of the finished puzzle on the front!
Sitting in a room in La Palma we have all kinds of multicoloured candles, fabrics and glassware ready to fill a restaurant that we haven’t seen for over six months. Somehow we also need to supplement this with the many many items we still have sitting in our front room (despite the luggage weight limit of practically nothing). There’s also the Groomsmen’s attire that we’ve never seen them wear, the wedding dress, my own clothes and best-man outfit that must stay with us at all times just in case on the flight, loads of bunting to go up using a ladder we’re not sure we have, a band that may or may not be able to play a first-dance song, flowers that we are selecting the day before and a cake topper that is going on an as-yet undesigned cake that is being baked on the morning of the wedding. We have all of these separate pieces that we know in theory will fit together, but do the pieces we have together make the whole?
When I’ve asked this question to friends they’ve all asked me the same thing: “You’ve spent most of your life in theatre putting shows together from nothing but a script, surely you can just picture it all!”
Well yes… to some extent I can. However there’s one missing link people seem to forget that ensures things never go too far wrong. When we put together a theatre show we rehearse it… and rehearse it… and just when you thought you couldn’t rehearse it any more the director throws in another dress rehearsal just to perfect it before anyone else sees it. In fact we also have a perfect scale model and various painstakingly drawn diagrams of every last detail of the show to go with these rehearsals… We only get to try out this wedding business once and there’s not a model to be found anywhere except perhaps the Bridal dress shop and though pleasing to the eye they’re not exactly useful models in this regard!
So, with all the careful planning, creative designs and endless conversations about bunting what does it all boil down to? Well, in effect it comes down to blind luck and a leap of faith! And so, armed with my metaphorical whip, leather jacket and trademark hat, much like my great idol Indiana Jones inThe Last Crusade I must take that great leap of faith, for only in the leap from the lions head will I prove my worth. I can only hope that through some clever optical illusion it turns out to be a bridge through to the other side where upon my arrival some evil bloke will shrivel into an unconvincing corpse and a very old geezer will utter the classic words “You chose wisely” and it will turn out that I’m named after the dog… ok I may have taken this metaphor a little too far… just ignore that last bit! The leap of faith bit’s right though, but having watched Indy (possibly a few too many times) I have learnt from his mistakes…
You see with all his running from Nazis and trying to find maps and throwing people out of hot air balloons he forgot the one thing that could have made the whole process so much easier…
WHISKY!
Now there’s a plot line I can get on board with!
Now pour me a wee dram and bring on the jigsaws!
