Great Music for a White Wedding

I’ve been to a lot of weddings this year – four, in fact – and while I could suggest many ways in which I believe they could have been done better, I’m not going to: they were the marriages of friends, and a wedding is after all the happiest day of somebody’s life. The music has got to be changed though. If the couple were too scared to employ a taraf or too determinedly “sophisticated” to hire a DJ, then it’s standard non-threatening fare piped over the restaurant’s sound system:

#1 Eine Klein Nachte Wotsit.

#2 Handel’s Water Music (or is it Vivaldi’s Spring??)

#3 Something by Enya. A classic line from the classic (in my opinion) film School of Rock goes something like: “I’m taking them to a classical concert: you know, Beethoven, Mozart, Enya....”.

#4 The Radedski March: For when the many-tiered cake is wheeled in with it’s fireworks, looking like a confectioner’s mock-up of Flash Gordon’s spaceship.

#5 Something else by J. Strauss, e.g. the famous bit from the Blue Danube - honestly, anybody would think that Romanians wanted the Austro-Hungarian Empire back again....

Enough already. What they should play - but what’s happened to me, why have I become so cynical these days?? - is:

#1 The Beatles’ Your Mother Should Know.... how difficult you’re gonna to be to be married to.

#2 How You Gonna Keep Them Down on the Farm.... after they’ve seen Cluj. There’s no way that the country cousins after having eaten the Vol-au-vents and the bits of cheese wrapped around bits of ham are going share the trough with the pig again.

#3 Sonny and Cher’s (and with apologies to Gyppo in advance, here) Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.... is what your new in-laws are but we didn’t have the heart to tell you.

#4 In case there’s a bit of awkwardness on the wedding night they’re going to need a sense of humour (though hopefully not quite this much), Frankie Howerd’s version of Je T’Aime.

#5 About two thirds the way through, and a warning to the groom mainly, the Dead Kennedys’ (ahem, and I really must apologise for the indelicacy here, though I am in fact entirely responsible for it) Too Drunk to F**k: your beautiful bride has been refusing you until this night of nights, but the ţuică's really started to flow now and your new brothers-in-law want you in the hora and, well.... it’s your decision :-)

To end, the band they were too scared to book, Taraf de Haïdouks:

Gone To The Dogs

Now I have full-time employment I also have colleagues. One would wish for colleagues like Gareth, Colin or Johnny. But no. It’s hard to get any fun or indeed human interaction of any kind and therefore to have remained sane by Friday. My best bet - and my main source of Jeremy Clarkson news - is Doru, a jolly decent chap but with rather low horizons: “Barry Bogiss he won last night”; “Eh??”; “European Long Distance Lawnmower Rally. You did not see on Eurosport 2?”; “Oh, errr, yes, of course, errr...”; “Sven Spodsen he started well but his rotor blades were set too high. In London is raining a lot, yes?”; “…yes, indeed, yes, almost all the time, yes……. Chim chiminey, chim chiminey chim chim cher-ee….”.

So after the departure of my donkey friend, I’ve been forced to turn for companionship to the canine community. Dogs are plentiful here: domesticated, wild, feral, bi-feral, feral-curious… one of my wife’s cousins even has a dog that’s half wolf! I remember when it was the cutest puppy you ever saw, but now it’s a wolf, though for some reason still as soft as shite. The man next door has dachshunds, which he tells me – inexplicably, unless it’s to make me feel at home – are English. I’ve been convinced there are at least 20 of them, but Mrs Dilo assures me that because they move around so quickly and randomly it just seems like there’s a lot. I therefore applied my A.I. unsupervised learning and pattern recognition skills and deduced that there’s 3 of them, based on 3 distinct emergent patterns of fur-colouration. But Mrs Dilo, again, whose eagle eyes spot bargains, gypsy misdeeds, and the differences between hedge warblers and sedge warblers from several kilometres distance, assures me there’s 4 of them, but that 2 look quite similar. And they’ve got names: “Bruno”, “Blackie”, “Boo-Boo” and – oh yes – “Lady”.

Another mystery solved. I’m now friends with them all and with their Ţuică-breathed owner. We’ve barred them from our garden by boarding up the holes in the fence, but Bruno in particular can make himself incredibly low to the ground so it’s only a matter of time before he’s crapping on our carpet.

TV Transylvania #3

The Director General has failed again and again to reply to my suggestions for great new programmes and I really am losing my patience. I bet he's not even read them. I bet he's sitting in a jacuzzi right now at the Trans-TV Mansion with Sofia Vicoveanca, Lidia Bejenaru, Laura Lavric and any other floozies still lying around after last Saturday night's 5 hour extravaganza of folklore and cookery. So, I've summoned up all my energies for this last attempt to get his attention. It's the big one.

At Home With The Wurzels

A reality TV show. With a bit of luck, the last one ever made. As must now be yawn-inducingly evident to anybody reading this rubbish, this place does peasantry very very well. Get Germans to make your cars, Frenchmen your food, and Italians for design, fashion and everything else that’s totally meaningless, but if you want a bit of land cultivated and not too much backtalk, employ Transylvanians. But this puts me in a dilemma, for (1) not only am I still homesick but (2) I now also have a freshly awakened taste for yokels wearing silly costumes - they look great, dance and sing, make their own hooch and they’d give you their last plate of pork dripping. The only people who can administer to both these needs and so fill this aching chasm in my soul are The Wurzels. (The concept's not as daft as it seems: think, America's awash with stumbling ex-junkies yet chose to take Brummie Ozzie Osborne to its heart). And, here’s the clincher, does anybody remember Graeme Garden on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue singing these words to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy? That’s the Anthem Of The European Union, ladies:

“I am a cider drinker,
I drinks it all of the day,
I am a cider drinker,
It soothes all me troubles away,”

(all together now, Europhiles, especially Daphne...)

“Ooh aargh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh aay,
Ooh aargh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh aay.”