November to February tends to be an awkward time for me. I
go into an awkward frame of mind, possibly because a lot of the most difficult
episodes of my life happened between November and February. Some even
spanned the whole period. An odd coincidence, but true.
I was born in November and I got married in November. Not
that they were the worst things that ever happened, of course, but getting married was
a bit of a mistake (or part of the learning process, which I suppose is pretty
much the same thing) and it might possibly be argued that being born was the worst thing of
all. But I won’t try to argue it, not right now at any rate.
Tonight’s episode of Sherlock
was set mostly at a wedding, and the reasons he gave for hating such events
(during his brilliant best man speech) were just about exactly what I would
have said if only I’d been capable of the same degree of eloquence. It also
reminded me of the fact that nobody ever asked me to be his best man because I
was never anybody’s best friend. (I thought I was one person’s best friend
once, but he emigrated to Australia
without even telling me he was going, so I suppose that was another useful bit
of the learning process.) And it gave me the clue as to one very good reason
why I was never the marrying kind:
Bridesmaids. I’m the sort who would spend the whole of his
wedding day wanting to cultivate the acquaintance of the bridesmaids, and
you’re not supposed to do that, are you? It just so happened that my wedding
was a very low key affair at a registry office with only seven others in
attendance (including a baby) and the only person passing as a bridesmaid was
my wife’s sister who wasn’t my type. If she had been, things might have been
different. My wife and I could have got divorced straight away and the poor
woman would have been spared the 6½ arduous years of living with me.
But there’s an even bigger reason why I’m not the marrying
kind: I don’t join things. When people get married they don’t just enter a cosy
little arm-in-arm association which involves calling each other Mr and Mrs and
wearing the same colour sweater, they create a mind-melded third entity and
join it. That’s the most intimate of all forms of joining, and when you’re not
the joining sort…
And there are other reasons which are deep and subtle and
complex and psychological and which I decline to go into.
At the end of tonight’s episode Sherlock walked away from
the wedding alone while everybody else engaged with the tradition of socialising and carousing. ‘And there,’ I thought, ‘go I.’
Only he didn’t have a black dog at his heels, so maybe it wasn’t November.
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