How Sez Sees It

I do these every so often and they are quite fun for me to figure out what the hell is going on in my life, even if they are not so fun for you to read. Helps me get my random thoughts in order. 1. In a week and a half I will be married! That is a terrifying prospect. I know I keep mentioning it but it will be so weird to go from a Critcher to a Harding in the space of a 15 minute ceremony. I actually can't wait for it to be honest but it will be strange after being a Critcher for nearly 30 years! 2. My knee is clearly not as bad as I thought it was. You may recall that I had a weird injury the other week (everything in my life is weird at the moment). I was sat at work and someone asked me to help them with something on the printer and when I stood up my knee trapped some cartilage. I have not felt pain like that probably ever, even when I tripped over a box working for Sainsbury's years ago and landed on both of my knees. The result was that, four weeks before the wedding...

That's pretty much it for the planning itself. We just have to remember when to pay for everything now. Dave has to sort out his suit and I have to help my maid of honor find a dress but everything else is done. The most difficult part has been trying to keep someone, who shall remain nameless, out of certain aspects of the planning. All in all we are really looking forward to the whole thing though. It is now less than five months until we get married and I am beginning to wonder if it will feel any different after we have gone through the ceremony and made it official.

From time-to-time I have expressed varying views on the idea of getting married. My biggest concern is that after I marry my fiance I will share the same name as a certain UK popstar who recently took part in the dangerous Channel 4 show, The Jump. That has caused hours of hilarity in the office at my expense. Then don't even get me started on the connotations of taking the man's surname. We have been through this before. There is still a part of me that thinks traditional marriage is all part of the medieval plans to strengthen alliances and gain power. An act from a time when women were the property of their father until marriage when they became the property of their husband. Modern marriage is a very different beast. For a start, neither myself nor my fiance are religious. This means no church wedding. We know his mum would probably prefer a church wedding but it is just not something we believe in and we would feel like hypocrites. We have gone for a civil ceremony and...

...in October. There will be no ding-dong of bells chiming though because it is a register office service. Weirdly I do not feel as stressed about this as I did about buying the house. I guess I feel I have more control over this. When we were buying the house we had certain things that we had to wait for and these were things out of our control. With this wedding it is an event and I have organised those before. I feel like if something doesn't get done I only have myself to blame and so I don't get stressed. For some reason I have always wanted an October wedding. I think it is because the weather should still be good without it being too hot for me and also because lots of people go for summer weddings and I am far from conventional in that thinking. Also it is way more expensive to get married in the popular summer months than it is in the autumn. My parents got married on the first weekend of October 36 years ago this year. They had a lovely day for it. In fact, I ...

I am engaged and before I get going I want you all to know that I am very happy. I do love my fiancé very much and I can’t wait for the day that we stand there in front of everyone and make a declaration of our love. There are some things that have made me question the institution of marriage and in fact any relationship. This may be the slight feminist in me talking or just personal experience and even from things I have seen around me. I just don’t feel comfortable with certain aspects of relationships. Let us take marriage as an example first of all. There is still an expectation in the western world that the woman will take the man’s name. I do know of a case where this was the other way round as the surname of the bride was rare and so the man took this name in order to keep it going. This is very unusual and generally speaking it is the woman who takes the man’s name. This convention is a hangover from the idea that marriage is a change of ownership from one man (father)...