My wedding and other disaster movies

I've been married to Ruth now for over 12 years, which is quite an achievement considering what a disaster the first 12 days were.

We got married on a Sunday, 18th July 1999, during the 10 am Sunday Service at St Francis, and then we were due to go straight down to Somerset for 12 days in a cottage.

We had barely finished clearing up the wrapping paper from our wedding presents when we were diverted from our intended plans by Ruth having to take Becky to A&E for an X-ray on a shoulder that she landed on after flying off the garden swing.

Hot Fuzz woz ere

 Instead of the planned drive south, we then spent our first evening as a married couple watching Star Wars 1, the Phantom Menace at the Showcase.  So that was two things gone wrong already.

We went to Somerset on the Monday instead, and by the Tuesday I was suffering from crippling stomach pains.  I couldn't sleep at night, or go to the toilet properly.

By Day 4 of married life, I was confined to bed and the kids were trying to get Ruth to take them home, and leave me there on my own.

Ruth tried to persuade me to go with them, but I was all for sticking it out.  It might get better, I said.

By Day 8 I'd been seen by an emergency doctor, who diagnosed me as having irritable bowel syndrome, which could have been brought on by a combination of pre-wedding stress and eating about 50 pieces of chicken at the party the night before the wedding.

Days 9 to 11 were a bit of an improvement and were spent in and around Longleat, feeding goats, looking out the car window at lions and tigers and having monkeys rip bits off and wee on our car. 

Around 5 pm on Day 12, probably lulled into a false sense of security by having 3 reasonable days in a row, I drove off a kerb during the leaving of Longleat, and I managed to remove the entire exhaust from the already peed on car.  Instead of being attached to the underside of the car, the exhaust was now parked next to it on the grass.  I sat next to both of them, feeling sorry for myself, while Ruth took the kids off to phone for a recovery vehicle.  This was in the days before mobile phones, so she probably had to knock Lord Longleat up to use his phone, I'm not sure.    

Luckily Ruth's brother lived in Wells then, so we managed to crash on his floor for the 5 days it took to get the car back from the garage.  We did have to call off Michael's quad biking birthday party though, because we couldn't get home for it, something he still reminds me of till this day.  Instead of him riding a quad bike, he spent his 9th birthday hanging around the Fleet Air Arm museum, looking bored.

When we did eventually get home, after 17 days away, we discovered that the thermostat in our fridge had died during our absence, and we had to set about disposing of the fridge full of penicillin which we'd managed to grow while we'd been gone.

A few years ago, we were at the cinema watching Hot Fuzz and partway through the film it dawned on us that it had been filmed in Wells.  No wonder so much of it seemed familiar to us.

Towards the end of the film, the market square is the scene of a set piece battle between the police and the elderly gun-toting Neighbourhood Watch, and you get to see, in graphic detail, the town centre of our former honeymoon destination being shot to pieces.

CSI Wells - getting over our honeymoon

Much as I love Wells, there was something cathartic about seeing it being destroyed in a film.  Seeing chunks of masonry getting shot off the public loos where I'd spent hours trying to move on a particularly painful episode of wind gave me an absurd amount of pleasure, as did seeing the local Somerfield getting smashed up by riot policemen with shopping trolleys, and batons.

 We went back to Wells in 2010 and rode around it on our bikes a bit, and stayed in a nice cottage, and got our photographs taken outside the pub used in the film, and we bought some fizzy pop and chocolate from Somerfield, and that along with watching Hot Fuzz about 20 times since, has helped to ease the pain....