The one where we finally got married

Those of you who’ve been following my blog (or my pathetic whining) for a good few years will know how much I longed for André to make an honest woman of me. And failing that impossibility, for all kinds of reasons – romantic and practical – I just wanted to marry the shit out of that man so much.

The perfect proposal moments and locations have come and gone over the years without being seized. From the time the world-famous Azure Window in Gozo crumbled to the sea just before we got there, to the time I threw myself into the sea with humpback whales and tiger sharks in Australia to prove I was brave and worthy (and somewhat deranged) wife-material. I’ve held my breath excitedly under the Eiffel Tower in Paris, on The Bridge of Sighs in Venice, and even dropped unsubtle hints outside Cinderella’s Palace at Disneyland; utterly convinced that magical moment was coming when he’d drop to one knee, whip out something sparkly and profess undying love for me.

Much to my frustration, marriage was never high on his list of priorities (we’ll discuss his emotional scars another time), and I’ve got rather too fat, old and gnarly to imagine myself looking anything but a little bit silly waddling around in a frou frou wedding dress. At our age, dropping to one’s knee can sometimes mean not being able to get back up again without assistance. And with my weight issues and his back troubles it would be cruel to expect him to carry me over any threshold. So my delicate little dreams just got shelved in the deep, dark place where I ram down the rest of my repressed trauma and bitter regrets. Like an old, stale, very dry croissant that I didn’t have room in my stomach for.

And then Artificial Intelligence came into my life, like a digital fairy godmother, waving its magic wand of ludicrously phenomenal artwork seemingly made by non-existent five year olds. (For those who are unfamiliar, this fairly recent and rapidly developing technology allows computer software to learn how to make its own images, sometimes impossibly hard to tell from the real thing, other times not so hard…)

It promised the Earth and delivers everything except the right amount of fingers on each hand or pupils that face the same direction. As a professional artist I should shun it – especially seeing as our own work has been harvested to train these demonic systems into stealing our jobs. But acknowledging that you can’t avoid progress, and that embracing new tools can add unexpected strings to well-worn bows, I admit I have been known to dabble on the sidelines of AI tools and apps. Playing with the enemy, perhaps, but isn’t it always better to know one’s enemy?

What does this have to do with my eternal spinsterhood, I hear you ask? Well, one subsection of my wedding dream was just to have some lovely wedding photos of André and I looking hot and smart, gazing at each other longingly without one of us blinking, having our tongues hanging out, or too many chins involved. When you work with your other half in a workshop setting and spend 99% of your time in a pair of paint-stained men’s overalls, no makeup, hair like something that had to be surgically removed from a cow’s stomach and very VERY little sleep, then little romantic fantasies like this can become a bit of an obsession. But there are no such framed pictures around our house for me to smile at wistfully.

Until now…

Because yesterday, one of those AI avatar creation apps popped up in an advert on my Instagram feed offering me my dreams on a plate. No matter that André never said ‘I do’, because I could get our wedding photos done anyway with the help of good old, honest and true, deep fakey AI algorithms!! It would cost me £5.99 for the privilege, but considering the cost of the average wedding these days is a gazillion pounds, half a kidney and your first born child, I’d say that was bargainous to get even a little sliver of wedded bliss. Even if the man in question hadn’t consented.

So I paid my subs and uploaded the requested 10-20 photos each of my future husband and I, and I waited for the clever computers to do their thing….

Friends, I was not disappointed. Within twenty minutes, my phone photo feed was full to bursting with a life we’d never lived, clothes we’d never worn, tiered cakes we’d never eaten, and more hilarity than my wheezing asmathic lungs could cope with in one sitting. Hearing me chuckling away to myself louder and louder, bordering on squealing like a piglet, real life André was very curious to see what I was looking at.

I honestly wasn’t sure how he’d take it. I mean, if we hadn’t been dating for forever, it’s the sort of thing that might be seriously creepy and stalkerish if someone does it to you without permission. No doubt many a teenage girl is using the same app to create the wedding of their dreams to Harry Styles or their favourite chemistry teacher perhaps. Or scary little incels who’ve less chance of getting married than I do are using it to create wallpaper for their bedrooms of them and Suzy who works at Iceland or perhaps just something to angry-wank over starring them and Taylor Swift.

But thankfully André couldn’t help but fall head over heels in love with our newly digitised wedding photos. And the entire evening was spent with us pouring over every single one just as real life married couples do the moment their photographer sends them the first proofs.

The photos can be divided into several categories from the sublime to the ones that nearly made us lose bladder control, and we honestly couldn’t pick a favourite. So let’s start with the ones my granny would have loved, like the one above. I mean screw Kate Middleton…I always knew I could rock a tiara. But look at Brylcreem Boy André – doesn’t he look dapper? With just enough of a dash of Peaky Blinder about him that you know he’ll be fun on the wedding night.

Speaking of the wedding night…

…where I was so busy laughing at Andre’s new haircut I didn’t even notice he was so excited to get in my satin pyjamas that he’d literally grown an extra leg. Or perhaps we had just sat on a bridesmaid.

But even with unexpected limbs or unexpected guests in the bridal suite, it was clearly a successful liaison where he swiftly got me up the duff…

…and clearly aged several decades from the stress of it, whilst I (having given up reminding him of the importance of wearing factor 50 sun screen) have retained my gorgeous youthful complexion for our vow renewal ceremony a few years later.

And yet, with him gaining in height and wealth what I’ve miraculously lost from my waistline, and racing rapidly towards the grave on his favourite horse he still manages to run for president with me at his side as doting First Lady and get me pregnant YET AGAIN!!

Then there were the ones where we revisited ACTUAL real life hairstyles we had in the 80s (André denies this of course having been bald the entire time I’ve known him, but I’ve heard several rumours of a legendary permed mullet from his old school chums so I choose to believe it is real).

There were even the ones where André mysteriously changed gender…

…and the ones where a horse as big as a dinosaur followed us around photobombing the wedding pics….

…the obligatory ones where we grew extra fingers and even an extra arm or two..

Cuddling up on the sofa last night, flicking through our many fabulous photos, it brought back so many (false) magical memories, not only of our special day but of our incredible honeymoon in Texas (that just might have opened up a brand new favourite bedtime fantasy for me)…

Laughing till we could hardly breathe with happy tears cascading down our cheeks, we vowed to print out as many as possible and put them in frames around our house, sharing the memories we never had with anyone who comes to visit, looking forward to a future when we are long dead and our descendants have to try to figure out what the hell was real from our photo albums. We know the stories about how great grandma got headbutted by a Humpback whale that time, but did she really sky dive? Did she really ride a stunt motorcycle? Did she ever really marry Great Grandpa or did he leave her hanging until the very end? And did she ever reaaally fit in those leather trousers? Good luck with figuring that out, offspring’s future offspring!

Never have we ever enjoyed something so much that never actually happened. If you are griping that you didn’t get an invitation to our fabulous 20s/50s/80s themed wedding, or why you missed the birth announcements for André junior and the twins, we’ll get back to you on that one.

Tonight I’m just re-writing our back story so we got to meet each other and fall in love in high school instead of our 30s. That way I got to love him before his pubes came in and he got to love me before I could tuck my breasts in the waistband of my knickers. And I really would have loved him so much back then, even with all that hair.

Reality is so last year, people. And as much as we cherish all our real memories, I’m not sure many of them have made us belly-laugh quite as much as this priceless gem that will now adorn our mantlepiece till we’re too old and addled to remember it was never really us. I SO need this to be us. 😉

Maybe somewhere out there in the multiverse there is another version of us with hair that big, and taste that bad, laughing at AI photos of ‘me’ in my paint-stained overalls and André with absolutely no hair, swearing they’d still love each other even if those photos were real.