Begone, foul procrastinatrix

Monday evening after work, I got home and decided I really should try on the headdress I’m planning on wearing to our wedding. It’s borrowed from Mr W’s sister. When she loaned it to me, nearly six months ago, I figured, to hell with it if it makes my oval face look like it’s a mile long, it’s a free loan and something else I don’t have to organise. I’d tried it on before and it hadn’t rocked my world, admittedly, but I decided that it would be fine. How in the name of all that’s holy I managed to overlook the fact the damn thing doesn’t actually fit, I’ll never know. Monday evening I tried it on, willing it to miraculously frame my face perfectly and still permit me to move my head without the thing falling off. Obviously, not being a deity, I don’t have superpowers so it hadn’t shrunk.

Damn and blast. And, of course, no Mr W to add a much needed sense of perspective. By the time he got home from work, I was well on the way to cancelling the wedding and booking a cab to Gretna Green.

I extrapolated from this one bad (headdress) experience that I’ll look like a pig in a sack in my wedding dress. My hair will look silly – especially with this particular headdress. My makeup will (I’m on a roll by this point) not hide the mahooosive spot that will develop two days before the wedding. I could go on. In fact, I will - I’ll share the inner machinations of a complete lunatic. I decided I wanted to ban all cameras apart from the official one, and I was going to hire a sniper to take out the videographer (note – these are being organised and, incredibly generously, paid for by Mr W’s parents. I’ve not met either photographer or videographer. Can you really see the stressball that’s me volunteering to have multiple records of a day on which I’m certain I’m going to look my ugliest?).

By the time Mr W came home from work I was in a toys-out-of-pram extravaganza. He successfully morphed from knackered-guy-with-serious-deadlines-at-work to future-husband-of-a-Jewish-princess, in a matter of nano-seconds.

“No, honey, you can’t ban cameras.” “You’ll have power of veto over all photographs and you’ll have had someone else to do your hair and make-up”. When he hears the “pig in a sack” line, though, he starts to smile and that helps me peel myself off the ceiling and get a grip. I’m unlikely to look like anything in a sack, unless you know of a vendor of ivory sacks with matching bolero jackets…

However it took until Tuesday evening when my best mate came over for me to properly chill out. She looked at the headdress in horror. This girl is good – she’s been my friend during my Laura Ashley phase (it was actually my mother’s phase but I ended up wearing the clothes), and is a good poker player. She can usually cover emotions quite well. Not this time – one look at her horror-stricken face and I knew it was a re-run of the day of the blue and green flowery shirt.

Tuesday evening was spent sitting on a sofa reminiscing about the 24 years we’ve been friends. Since the age of 6. On Tuesday we properly regressed and chortled at ourselves. When I had walked her back to the tube, I wandered around the area for a while, getting my head together, and resolving to stop procrastinating. Today I’ve finalised the order of service, booked my dry-run hair appointment, confirmed the shoes I bought are actually the nicest ones I could find, prepared a proposal for the florist (her job, but she hadn’t got it right and I’m not signing *anything* where the prices are preceded by the word “from”), made a shortlist of shops to visit (on Friday, natch) where I’ll probably find a lovely headdress which will restore my faith in the fact that maybe, just once, I’ll look OK in a photograph.