Donald MacInnes: Brought back down to earth with a bump by wedding costs

In The Red

This week I return to a subject which has not troubled these pages for a while — my approaching wedding. I took the decision to step back from discussing my impending altar-ed state a few weeks ago, after none other than my Best Man (let's call him "Nigel") told me off for going on about it. In print.

"Why do you keep going on about it? In print?" he asked, as we both hung upside-down from the wall bars in my home gym. I frowned, although given that I was upside-down, an onlooker would have mistaken the surprise and hurt conveyed by my raised eyebrows to be something like resignation tinged with joy. Either way, I said nothing.

Later, as we bounced around on my pair of space hoppers, I asked him what he meant.

"What… do… you… mean…?", I said, narrowly avoiding banging my head on the cornicing.

"You… just… spend… a… lot… of… time… talking… about… how… much… your… wedding is costing!" Nigel said, coming to an abrupt stop.

I sighed and reached for the stepladder, as my old friend had overestimated the flaccidity of his hopper and bounced through the ceiling.

Once I had rescued him, I asked what I could do about this over-reliance on nuptial data for a weekly column ostensibly about personal finance.

"I don't know," he said, smearing antiseptic cream on to his grazed forehead, as I replastered the ceiling.

"Why don't you stop talking about it for, say, six weeks? Give us all a break."

So, due to the fact that I always follow Nigel's advice (stemming from the time he told me to quit the school rugby team, as I was embarrassing myself with all the squealing), I have not discussed the prohibitive cost of my wedding since.

But now I feel I must revisit the subject, if only to ensure that my sponsorship deal with The-Bride-Is-Everything-And-You-Are-Just-Something-For-Her-To-Lean-On.com doesn't lapse.

We're in the process of booking the last few nights of our honeymoon in Italy. It's not the accommodation which has represented the greatest drain on our funds, but the transportation.

We booked a costly wee convertible for zooming around the Amalfi coast. It's a Fiat Barchetta and, as the prospective Mrs Me is too scared to negotiate those coastal curves, I shall be doing the driving.

d.macinnes@independent.co.uk