Early last year Jo went on a rowing holiday. It was great – I didn’t have to hear anyone talk about rowing for a whole week (or so I thought – she phoned me mid-week to tell me all about it). When she returned she told me not to get excited but that she was a little late. So obviously I got quite excited.
About
a week later she took a pregnancy test. She came downstairs excited and so I got excited, only for her to tell me that she was just excited that she’d taken the test and that she had to wait a few minutes for the result. A few minutes pass and she comes back
down with the good news and we both got even more excited.
One of the weird things about finding out you’re having a baby is being unable to tell people your exciting news for a while. I completely understand the reasons, but this is something you really want to share with people and it can be quite difficult keeping such an exciting secret.
There
was a weird rollercoaster of emotions that I went through after finding out we were having a baby. It started with excitement and then went through fear – about how our lives would change, whether I would be able to deal with the lack of sleep, if I’d be good
at being a dad – and alternating between the two before settling very much on the side of excitement.
Like a wedding, having a baby requires a lot of planning. This was where I felt most comfortable and helped with controlling the fear and increasing the excitement.
Nine
months is a long time to wait for a baby. It can make you especially broody, well it made me especially broody at least. I have a total of 5 nephews and nieces who are awesome and have just made me want a mini human of my own even more. However even 9 months
is not enough to make you mentally ready for the moment you get rushed into hospital.
One
of the things we did in preparation was a short hypnobirthing course. I had a vague idea of what it was as my sister-in-law had used it for her second child but I was very impressed by it and would recommend it for anyone who is due to give birth as it gives
you a very positive attitude towards the experience, regardless of what route your birth takes.
The
birth itself went quite well. Not a textbook birth, but possibly as close as you could realistically expect. Having heard stories about other people’s birth experiences, we were very lucky in our experience.
Everything
went really quickly on the day. So quickly in fact that there was a point at which I thought I would have to catch our child but fortunately the midwife came back into the room at the vital moment.
And
now we have a baby. She is called Imogen Scarlett Eileen Anderson. She is called Imogen as that was one of the few names we could agree on, Scarlett after her gran and Eileen after her great-gran who was born 99 years and 364 days before her. I’m sure I’ll
tell you more about Imogen in the future.
I’ve been meaning to write a blog about our wedding for quite some time. The problem that I’ve had before is that there’s so much I could write about, however most of it will be so detailed and personal that it will only be of interest to a very small group of people. So I’m going to try to just talk about the few most significant things about our big day.
Firstly, everyone says it’s the best day ever. I’m often reluctant to believe what everyone says about things. Everyone said that Napoleon Dynamite was great but that’s an hour and a half of my life that I’m not getting back. Everyone says that pineapple on pizza is wrong but it’s the best pizza topping by far. Everyone doesn’t know what they’re talking about. However in this instance, it turns out that everyone was actually correct.
The whole day was spent seeing our friends and family and they were all so happy for us (or just wanted a free meal). It’s just like having a massive birthday party for all of your birthdays at once. It truly is the best day ever. The main downside to this is that there is a limited time and if you’ve invited a large number of guests it won’t be possible to spend a lot of time with them all. It is important to not worry about this. Spend your day with who you want to spend it with – whether that is the people you see all the time, those that you don’t see because they live so far away or a combination of both of them. It is easy to get pulled in 100 different directions. One of the best bits of advice we got was to make sure we spent a bit of time together to enjoy the day. You could potentially spend most of the day barely seeing the person you’d just married so grab a moment or two together when you can.
Obviously the wedding day doesn’t just happen. The day involves a lot of build-up and preparation. I actually really enjoyed planning. I’m very much the planner. After the proposal Jo told me – “right, that’s my bit done. Now you need to plan it!”
In reality it was still shared. I came up with a couple of options and discussed with Jo who would then help to make a decision. One thing we were trying to do which I really recommend is to make it feel like your day. Make it feel as personal as possible. We had zombies, Lego, Jane Austen and rowing boats as these are the things that we enjoy (between us – please don’t take this as any endorsement of rowing on my part).
We were slightly worried that it wouldn’t all go together but as soon as I got there and it all looked awesome I relaxed. Everything just felt right. Not that I expected it to feel wrong, but we’d arranged lots of different things as separate decisions and had no idea what it would all look like when it was put together. I know it will be different for other people but that was what really helped me to settle into the day. All of the planning came together and there was nothing for me to worry about any longer. Getting married seemed really easy after that!
Another sign of the personalisation was the fact that ours was the only wedding I’ve been to where there was a mosh pit. We were very particular about the music. We had a DJ provided by the venue who had lots of suggestions about things he could do but we were very clear in our minds what we wanted. We gave him a playlist of songs that we knew our friends would dance to and let him improvise a little around that but we did have to reign him in a bit around other stuff. This is totally fine. Everyone realises that it’s your day and that it needs to be how you want it to be.
The day itself was not as much of a blur as I expected it to be. I’ve got a good memory of a lot of things about it.
Whilst I know the bride will be excited about getting ready and making themselves look amazing, they miss out on one of the bits that was most enjoyable for me, which was getting to greet everyone as they turned up. I also had to shout at some people for taking drinks into the wedding area. Apparently if that happens the wedding might get called off. I’d imagine that the official people don’t often follow through with that threat, but I wasn’t taking the chance.
Of all of the day, the ceremony is what I remember least about. That’s the only bit that seemed to go by really quickly, and that is possibly to do with it being the most important bit and me concentrating on doing all of our bits right. We had two friends pick awesome readings, which really suited the whole feeling of the day. We wrote our own vows. It seemed important to us that we told each other how we felt in front of a bunch of people. Public speaking is scary, but telling the person you love how you feel on your wedding day is surprisingly not so. We wrote our vows on a bit of card which I pulled out of my sporran to laughter. I’m not sure exactly where else I was supposed to have kept them. It was nice to later discover that a friend had filmed the whole thing on their phone which they sent to us and we were able to watch it through.
As I have written previously, we both changed our name upon marriage. As part of the signing process, we also signed deed poll forms. A few weeks later, Jo had to re-sign them as I had told her to sign in the wrong place. Oops. That’s all sorted now and we both have a new name.
After the ceremony, the rest of the day is basically socialising, which is quite easy when everyone is there to wish you a good time. The main structured bits after that involve everyone staring at you, and it is easy to get nervous about them. I was much more nervous when I was a best man at my brother’s wedding, however. I think there is a lot more pressure on the best man to be funny and/or entertaining. I returned the favour to my brother and he delivered an excellent best man speech complete with a PowerPoint presentation.
As we believe in equality, it was decided fairly early on that Jo was going to do a speech and hers was great and funny, and I was annoyed because I had to follow her! There is not much pressure on the groom’s speech, though as you’re supposed to be quite soppy and I was pretty good at that.
The most important things of all are a) we got married and b) it very much felt like our wedding day. We had managed to personalise it and the memories will stay in our heads forever.
[This is copied from what wrote in my super occasionally kept journal on the 8th of August 2016]
I am now engaged to be married! This is very exciting, although it is taking a little time to sink in as, although I always thought that this was the path that me and Jo were on, the fact that we have taken another step along it is awesome. We have decided to take a little time to enjoy the feeling before we start with the planning.
We had previously discussed that Jo would be the one to do the proposing. This is for a couple of reasons – firstly that I would have done it far too soon.
Secondly, and more importantly, we both believe that we have been living in a male dominated society for far too long. Why should it be that men are the ones who decide when to get married and have all the power in relationships? The only way to change this is by small individual gestures to attempt to change it.
On Friday night (5th August), I got home from a day of watching cricket in the sunshine to find that Jo had made a candlelight dinner for us. I knew that she was arranging dinner but we usually eat in front of the TV so this was a nice romantic addition to my evening.
We had egg wrap things – I’m sure there must be a technical term for these but I don’t know what it is – and then I offered to do the washing up. This is the point when I started to twig that something might be up, as Jo told me she wanted to enjoy the ambience.
A few minutes later, she told me she had a present for me, and that there was a treasure hunt I had to go through in order to find it. She had placed the clues in significant places – for example, one was by our guardian deity, Thor.
After some searching, I had worked my way through the six clues and returned to her with my present which she gave to me whilst telling me all the reasons she wanted to marry me as I cried tears of joy. When she asked me to marry her, I said “of course I will.”
The rest of the evening was spent talking and cuddling and enjoying being engaged before we started to tell people the next day.
Falling
in love, they say, like breaking up is hard to do. Or at least I could have sworn that was a saying. Or at least in a song. Having done a Google, I now think that I’ve probably made it up. Which is annoying as I was about to disagree with it. So now I’m just
going to disagree with something that possibly has never been said by anyone ever which makes me look a little bit weird.
Falling
in love with Jo was possibly the easiest thing I’ve ever done. And I think that’s probably how I knew it was right. After our first date she thought to herself “I wonder if I’ve just met my husband.” She didn’t tell me that until way later as she didn’t want
to come across as crazy. I’m not sure I would have thought she was (although at that time I didn’t know how addicted she was to rowing) because the first date was basically perfect and it wasn’t long before I was thinking the same thing.
It
is possible that the first date went so surprisingly well as I didn’t have any expectations going into it. I had been doing online dating off and on for a good few years and whilst a few of the dates went well, the majority seemed to be less than average.
As someone who has a reasonable understanding of maths I know that this is statistically impossible. The whole online dating thing could fill up several blogs on its own. There is a lot of time and effort that needs to be put in to even establish any sort
of meaningful communication. Whilst I knew a few people who had met their partners online, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope that I would do so too and therefore I went into our first date not really expecting anything amazing.
After
that first date I changed my mind quite quickly. We went for a drink at the now non-existent Googies before taking a stroll down to Folkestone Harbour where we sat near the mermaid watching a storm over the Channel (Thor really helped a brother out), ate cake
(Rocky Road which has marshmallows in which I hate), talked (about castles and music) and eventually kissed. We clicked instantly and there were no awkward silences or the frantic scrambling around for conversation topics that can often plague first dates.
I
was very excited to keep in touch and arrange a second date which also went well. We went to a Tapas bar and then for our third date, I persuaded Jo to go to the cute little cinema in Folkestone to watch a film I’d heard good things about (but not heard what
the plot was). It was called Gone Girl which – in case you were wondering – is not a particularly romantic film. Afterwards Jo did promise to never frame me for her murder though, so that was a positive. She’s kept that promise to this date.
Despite
my catastrophically unromantic choice of movie, things continued to go well. It just felt so natural. To repeat a bit of the speech that I gave at our wedding, when I was single I had often asked my friends who had got married how they knew they’d met the
person they were going to marry. Their answers were varied – one said they couldn’t imagine finding anyone better, one said that they made each other better, one said they made everything better even the bad stuff and another said that there was just no bullshit.
It was near the start of our relationship that I realised that all of those were true about me and Jo. If anyone asked me that question now, I would say that I knew I’d marry Jo because it was just obvious that I would.
Why was it so obvious? It was obvious because it was obvious. Which I know is a tautology but so what? Jo and I each have our own things but we also share in each other’s things at times. We make each other laugh. We make each other smile. We have lots of fun. Jo is an amazing human being – she is fun, funny, caring, thoughtful, adventurous… and exactly the person I was looking for.
Once upon a time, I went on a little road trip around England. One of the things I was wanting to do was to climb Scafell Pike. I ended up not doing so. For a few reasons.
1. It is really big and I am generally quite lazy.
2. I was on my own and thought I might navigate myself to certain doom.
3. The weather was supposed to be bad for climbing mountains.
So instead I did other things. However, climbing the mountain got put on my bucket list as a result of not climbing it. I resolved to do so when I wasn’t so lazy, had someone to navigate me away from doom and when it wasn’t so windy.
Therefore, I gathered a band of intrepid adventures and we made our way to the Lake District on holiday (having previously done a similar thing in Snowdonia at the same time last year) to complete this feat. Due to amazing planning, we were there the week that the wettest place in the country had its summer and all managed to get a little bit of a sunburn.
The mountain is 980 metres high. This doesn’t sound like much until you try to go that high. Then it sounds a lot harder. When you have been climbing an hour and still can’t see the summit, it appears infinite.
Compared to Snowdon, it is actually smaller, however as a climb it is a lot more intense. Snowdown has more scrambly bits (I learnt that the technical term is scree) but also more flat bits. Scafell Pike is basically a 980 metre staircase. With big rocky stairs. I thought I knew what to expect having done Snowdon but this was a lot more intense. But we all managed it, see! Go team!
Several years ago, I always got confused by people who went up mountains because they were there. Now I am that kind of person, and I can recommend it. You get a great sense of achievement, and you feel like you are on top of the world (both literally and metaphorically) and that you can achieve anything. I would definitely recommend it, as long as you have some idea what you are letting yourself in for and prepare adequately in advance.
There has already been talk about doing Ben Nevis next year to complete what is one of the slowest Three Peaks challenges, I am just giving my body a little time to recover before telling it about this.
Last week I went on holiday to Scandanavia with my girlfriend and did possibly the coolest thing I will ever do in my life. We were part of the crew on a Viking ship.
Other people sailing far at sea
When I say crew, I might be exaggerating slightly. It’s not as if we were hired and paid in plunder. We weren’t recruited by a fearsome leader for our brute strength and ruthlessness. What happened was a little more mundane.
We got to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde (pronounced Rosh-kill and more commonly known for the music festival which I had previously thought was called RockSlide) after a circuitous route through the town. Getting to the ticket desk, the enthusiastic Danish man asked us if we wanted to go on the Viking sail boat for 95 krone. He was so enthusiastic about it that I instantly thought “Of course I do!” but I looked at Jo to see if she wanted to spend that much money on it. She looked at me to see if I would be comfortable doing it despite being unable to swim and being terrified of drowning. After a while we concluded that yes, we both definitely wanted to do it and we booked our time slot.
Check out the glee on my little face
So we joined around 15 other tourists at the appointed time for a safety briefing with the captain of our ship. I don’t think that was her official term but I’ve forgotten her name. She told us that we’d all be wearing life jackets but they probably weren’t needed as no one had fallen in during the 25 years they’d been open which reassured me. It’s quite odd – I’ve got a fear of water that I’m able to give over after about 10 minutes on a boat. I’ve been on narrowboat holidays where I’ve been clambering around the outside of the boat, jumping assure and pushing off and jumping onto a boat, yet I still have an initial fear that I’m going to fall in and drown.
The captain also told us that we would need to do some rowing which excited me because it felt like a more authentic experience, and it excited Jo as she is a rower and it was a chance to try out rowing in a different boat.
As we were excited, we were the first ones onto the ship and we got to sit at the back of the boat which has a technical term that I forgot in my excitement. This meant that we were rowing what Jo has told me is called stroke, meaning that all the other rowers should follow our pace.
Having never rowed before, it took me a little while to get the hang of what I was supposed to be doing. During this learning phase, we went slightly off course and almost crashed into some moored boats at the side of the harbour. Reading this and knowing that the other rowers should be following my pace would suggest that it was my fault that we nearly crashed. I would like to submit my case to the jury thusly:
The woman behind me was rubbish. I had to repeatedly stop rowing as our oars would hit eat other. She was clearly not following my lead as she should have been. The only time my side of the ship were in time was when I looked back to see what she was doing and to follow her although this synchronisation was brief with her soon falling out of time again. It frustrated me a bit. She never would have made it as a Viking. She didn’t even have the beard for it.
Jo with the win through her hair and a sail in front of her
After a while we were out at sea and go to hoist the sail. As we were in the prime position, at different times myself and Jo both got to do important rope holding tasks. I was excited by this. Even though it mostly consisted of just holding a rope for about 10 minutes, there was a period at the start of pulling on the rope and at the end of slowly letting it out. As you can tell, I am easily pleased.
I was also selected by the captain (it may have just been that I was the nearest but I like to think that I was selected) to lower the sail. I got a bit confused by this as I thought if I lowered it, that it would fall straight into the sea or onto people. I had forgotten that this probably wasn’t the first time that they had lowered a sail on a Viking ship and they probably had a tried and tested method for doing so as I marvelled as the sail lowered itself perfectly between where the crew was sat.
Whilst we were sailing, the captain was warning us that we might have to row back in. I was really hoping we would get to do so as, whilst sailing was neat, we wouldn’t get the full Viking experience if we sailed straight back into port as they were doing later in the day.
As I have mentioned, this is perhaps the coolest thing I will ever do in my life and if you ever get the chance to visit Roskilde (just half an hour from Copenhagen on train), I urge you to do so. The rest of the museum is fun too – you can care your name in runes, paint a shield or sword and many other activities that are probably aimed at children as well as see the ruins from 5 Viking boats that were recovered last century.
I also love Tim Minchin. He shares a similar world view to me, is an amazing musician and makes me chuckle. Sometimes I think he is far too intelligent. For example, I saw him once do a philosophical joke. I studied philosophy at uni for three years (admittedly I’ve forgotten most of it now) and the joke went over my head.
When I heard that he’d written a musical based on Matilda I got excited. It was a bit like that time when Ben Folds and Nick Hornby collaborated. A mixture of a musician I like and an author I like gets me excited. These two art forms don’t generally cross over much.
I suggested to my girlfriend Jo that instead of getting each other a physical present, we arrange a day out for each other. Shortly after I suggested that, I started hoping that she remembered watching Matilda was on my bucket list. When we told each other what we had planned, and she revealed she’d got us tickets, I had a big grin on my face!
In fact, last week, I actually watched two musicals based on Dahl’s work. Our staff conference at work involved us going to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Drury Lane which was extremely enjoyable.
Whilst the Hornby/Folds album is good, and Charlie is great, the mixture of Minchin and Dahl blows both of them out of the water.
I’d heard lots of good things about Matilda from people who had been but I was still not prepared for how great it was and how the songs would be stuck in my head for the next few days.
The characters – especially the grown ups – are brilliant characatures that match the Quintin Blake illustrations from the book. I hadn’t seen the posters outside the Cambridge Theatre so I didn’t realise that Miss Trunchbull was played by a man and definitely let out a giggle when the reveal happened. Although to be honest, I was giggling throughout.
It was also very faithful to the source material and the parts where it diverged fitted in so well that you almost forget that they’ve been added.
I’m struggling to go on without adding any more spoilers. However, I urge you to go see it if you have any interest in Dahl, Minchin, musicals, theatre or laughing as it is quite simply the best show I’ve seen.
