I got married on a Wednesday. Neither of us were fussed about a big do, we’d been living together for a year anyway and most of our pals were, like our newly graduated selves, still skint from their student days and working weekends. Registry office, pub: let’s do it.
It was fun to briefly make my parents think there was another reason we were
heading down the carpeted aisle between the plastic chairs “in three weeks’ time?!”, although not so
much hers when her farmer dad did actually own several shotguns back then.
I upset my many relatives by keeping it small but this was because my intended's family was so small. Yet, when the registrar checked for the first available date, the most romantic gesture I could possibly make towards the actual love of my life – someone who, aherm, “knew what I liked” – was to forgo the Champions League final on her behalf.
What? No, I don’t mean forgo playing in it.
Eh? Miss attending the Champions League final? No – sorry – I don’t mean that either.
I mean not watching it live on the telly.
Hey, you don’t know me like she does, right. She knew that, for me, that was a big sacrifice. Huge.
One of our first dates-which-was-in-absolutely-no-way-a-date came two years earlier, when I hosted a party in my student flat room for the 1997 final. About a dozen of us crammed in there to watch Dortmund upset Juve on my wee portable colour telly and toast Paul Lambert as a Scotsman winning Europe’s biggest club prize, in Munich.
She wore shoes sprinkled as glitteringly silver as the European Cup and I was reminded of that first day I met her, after that exam, in that bar in that lane, with our various pals, when I first saw those eyes and a girl in my tutorial group remarked on those eyes, to their owner, and the eyes laughed with an embarrassed modesty that told me I was in serious trouble.
Luckily, I was off to Romania v Bulgaria at Euro 96 in Newcastle with my mate the next day. I left the bar early. That night, Friends was on the telly – the episode where Chandler accidentally lets Rachel know Ross has always loved her. Yeah that was creepy, Ross. Don’t be friends with someone you know you actually lust after.
So we watched the 1997 Champions League final together as pals. In my bedroom. On my bed. But there were lots of other men and women on the bed too. Friends, you might call them. But I'd buttoned down my feelings of anything other than friendship. I did the healthy thing. I buried stuff so deep I almost forgot it was there.
Two years later, here was I, deigning to not watch the European Cup final live on telly for the first time since – well, only since 1990, actually, when it wasn’t shown on terrestrial telly because English clubs were still banned from Europe. But – hey – don’t tell her that. Am I right, lads. Am I right!
She already maintains I was so stunned anyone would have me I had to take the first available date in case she changed her mind. And that patter is as crazy as it is unoriginal, right? Right, lads? Lads...?
Basically, my wife and I had our “reception” the night Bayern Munich chucked the Champions League final to Manchester United, in injury time. I had shed tears of joy - in a frighteningly pertinent metaphor considering what happened to my waistline over the next few years, all those buttons popped open to set my emotion free - the day Sammy Kuffour was on his knees, pounding the Camp Nou grass in the deepest full-time whistle pain of his life.
Four months later, Bayern had their revenge. In the city of our marriage, in the very parish in which Sir Alex Ferguson, breaker of Bayern hearts was born - in the group stage of the very same competition - Michael Tarnat equalised via Roque Santa Cruz’s armpit in the very final minute and I, in full physical attendance, almost breathed a sigh of relief that the world was still on its axis after knowing for the last hour the unwritten Laws of Facing FC Bayern demanded we had to follow up Jorg Albertz’s opener if we’d ever wanted to win this game.
On the final whistle, as Sammy Kuffour strolled happily off the pitch directly below me, I turned to see my wife and my best man crying.
And I didn’t think “how dare you act as devastated as I feel”. I was still a nice person back then. But, as I doled out the hugs and reassurance, I did wonder why, when they attended the football so very rarely – when they would have forgotten the score and maybe even the opponent in this game within a year – why the two most important young women in my life would shed a tear for it.
Or why I wouldn’t. Or why I suddenly needed to get them out of there before the ITV cameras picked out the back of the Copland Road stand.
To be, ye know, continued.
I upset my many relatives by keeping it small but this was because my intended's family was so small. Yet, when the registrar checked for the first available date, the most romantic gesture I could possibly make towards the actual love of my life – someone who, aherm, “knew what I liked” – was to forgo the Champions League final on her behalf.
What? No, I don’t mean forgo playing in it.
Eh? Miss attending the Champions League final? No – sorry – I don’t mean that either.
I mean not watching it live on the telly.
Hey, you don’t know me like she does, right. She knew that, for me, that was a big sacrifice. Huge.
One of our first dates-which-was-in-absolutely-no-way-a-date came two years earlier, when I hosted a party in my student flat room for the 1997 final. About a dozen of us crammed in there to watch Dortmund upset Juve on my wee portable colour telly and toast Paul Lambert as a Scotsman winning Europe’s biggest club prize, in Munich.
She wore shoes sprinkled as glitteringly silver as the European Cup and I was reminded of that first day I met her, after that exam, in that bar in that lane, with our various pals, when I first saw those eyes and a girl in my tutorial group remarked on those eyes, to their owner, and the eyes laughed with an embarrassed modesty that told me I was in serious trouble.
Luckily, I was off to Romania v Bulgaria at Euro 96 in Newcastle with my mate the next day. I left the bar early. That night, Friends was on the telly – the episode where Chandler accidentally lets Rachel know Ross has always loved her. Yeah that was creepy, Ross. Don’t be friends with someone you know you actually lust after.
So we watched the 1997 Champions League final together as pals. In my bedroom. On my bed. But there were lots of other men and women on the bed too. Friends, you might call them. But I'd buttoned down my feelings of anything other than friendship. I did the healthy thing. I buried stuff so deep I almost forgot it was there.
Two years later, here was I, deigning to not watch the European Cup final live on telly for the first time since – well, only since 1990, actually, when it wasn’t shown on terrestrial telly because English clubs were still banned from Europe. But – hey – don’t tell her that. Am I right, lads. Am I right!
She already maintains I was so stunned anyone would have me I had to take the first available date in case she changed her mind. And that patter is as crazy as it is unoriginal, right? Right, lads? Lads...?
Basically, my wife and I had our “reception” the night Bayern Munich chucked the Champions League final to Manchester United, in injury time. I had shed tears of joy - in a frighteningly pertinent metaphor considering what happened to my waistline over the next few years, all those buttons popped open to set my emotion free - the day Sammy Kuffour was on his knees, pounding the Camp Nou grass in the deepest full-time whistle pain of his life.
Four months later, Bayern had their revenge. In the city of our marriage, in the very parish in which Sir Alex Ferguson, breaker of Bayern hearts was born - in the group stage of the very same competition - Michael Tarnat equalised via Roque Santa Cruz’s armpit in the very final minute and I, in full physical attendance, almost breathed a sigh of relief that the world was still on its axis after knowing for the last hour the unwritten Laws of Facing FC Bayern demanded we had to follow up Jorg Albertz’s opener if we’d ever wanted to win this game.
On the final whistle, as Sammy Kuffour strolled happily off the pitch directly below me, I turned to see my wife and my best man crying.
And I didn’t think “how dare you act as devastated as I feel”. I was still a nice person back then. But, as I doled out the hugs and reassurance, I did wonder why, when they attended the football so very rarely – when they would have forgotten the score and maybe even the opponent in this game within a year – why the two most important young women in my life would shed a tear for it.
Or why I wouldn’t. Or why I suddenly needed to get them out of there before the ITV cameras picked out the back of the Copland Road stand.
To be, ye know, continued.
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