I spent the best part (and the worst part, come to that) of the weekend chaperoning Custard around before he got married to the lovely Helen. Fortunately, I managed to perform my duties as best man entirely adequately (no ring lossage, no groom lossage or breakage, etc, etc) and no major harm befell him, and he emerged from the church on Saturday afternoon a happily married man.

I, however, was substantially less than happy for a goodly portion of Saturday morning; not because my best friend was getting married, or anything like, that. No. It’s because I was just a teensy bit hung over. The night before the wedding, we went out for a meal, and a few drinks. We then proceeded to another pub for a few more drinks. At closing time, we headed back to the hotel bar for a few shots of whisky to round the night off. Once we’d finished off the whisky, we moved onto the brandy. Once we’d had the brandy, insanity set in, and we started on the Galliano (neat, not in a cocktail). Once we’d had our fill of Galliano, we suffered a “Really Great” cocktail prepared for us by some random member of hotel staff (the exact ingredients of which I’m still unsure, but vodka, cointreau, sugar and fire were definitely invovled). In retrospect, I think the beginning of the end was when we made friends with the barman.

I remember a evil green hedgehog. I’m fairly sure it wasn’t a hallucination.

However, the combination of a hearty cooked breakfast and a couple of nurofen sorted me out, and fortunately the groom seemed unaffected (doubtless his Yorkshire constitution proving as strong as ever). The rest of the wedding day proceeded much as you’d expect – hours of photos, followed by drinks, cutting of the cake, speeches (mental note: next time, make sure you’ve gone through it at least once before you give a speech, and ensure that the pop-culture reference that your entire speech hinges upon is appreciated by more than two people in the audience), a buffet and a cringingly awful disco (never more than two people on the floor, but to the DJs credit, he did play Spitting Image’s Chicken Song).

Went windsurfing on Sunday. Best wind all summer. My arms ache like a bastard now, though.

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Galliano – just say no.

Technically, I’m not allowed to browse the web during working hours, on account of how it “wastes time” or some such managementish ridiculousness. However, as my boss is currently standing around talking to a couple of other guys about weightlifting and bodybuilding (and has been doing for the last 10 minutes or so), is it so bad if I take the same 10 minutes out of my day to catch up on a few blogs and write this entry?

On the table over there are two female arts students, who have spent the whole journey talking very loudly about how much debt they have, how much of the year they’ve spent pissed off their face, which of the blokes in Big Brother is the most fanciable, and discussing articles in Heat as if it were the Holy Bible.

Next to me is a Japanese guy who has been playing some kind of cutesy japanese golfing game on his Gameboy Advance since he got on.

Behind me is a scally mum with two screaming brats, who she creates a positive feedback loop with by yelling at them every time they cry, which naturally just makes their screams all the louder.

And me? I’m sitting here with my headphones on, trying not to annoy anyone and just waiting for the journey to end.

I’ve been replaying Age of Mythology in my lunch breaks recently. It’s a cracking game, and if you like strategy games even slightly, you owe it to yourself to give it a bash (unless you’re one of these freaks who prefers the C&C series to Age of Empires, in which case it’ll probably just annoy you).

Thing is, though, there’s an inherent problem in replaying an RTS. On the early levels, you always spend hours and hours building up your base, researching new tech and churning out thousands of military units, only to send your monster army off into battle and discover that your enemy is three donkeys and some guy holding a toothpick. And you can’t help feeling slightly disappointed when the titanic battle you’d hoped for ends in slightly less than 3 seconds when one of your monster iron-plated siege units accidentally rolls over the top of the entire opposing army: it’s just not as satisfying as watching then kick the crap out of each other for half an hour.

That said, this will doubtless soon come to an end once the difficulty level starts to rise and I find myself staring at a screen full of burning buildings and fleeing villagers before I’ve even built my military academy. Ah well.

Songs which feature the following sounds ought to be banned:

• The “new message” beep my phone makes.
• Anything at all that could be confused for a sound my car would make if it were about to break down or explode in a big cloud of bolts and smoke.
• Any sound that has ever come from Shania Twain’s mouth.

Currently sat at the top of Blogdex, and likely to remain there for some time:

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Oops.

Text message exchange between my beloved and I yesterday:

From: Me
To: Naomi
I am in pain. Both Custard and I had to face the firing squad. I’ve got some lovely bruises coming now.

From: Naomi
To: Me
Ha ha.

From: Me
To: Naomi
Nice to know you’re sympathetic. Someone pointed out that it’s probably a good job that you weren’t there as I’d have probably come off even worse.

From: Naomi
To: Me
Yes.

I had an idea along these lines a few years ago, but never actually did anything with it. The audio clips are really quite astonishing.