R.S.V.P.

Today a friend told me that she was getting married this time next year. Apparently, she was telling me this now, so that I had sufficient time to find an excuse not to attend. You see, she's known me long enough to realise that I really do hate and loathe such social occasions with a vengeance. I can't really say why exactly I detest weddings so much - maybe it is all the fake bonhomie, perhaps it is the tedium of all the tired old rituals everyone has to go through, or it might simply be that I increasingly believe the institution of marriage to be utterly irrelevant. I have no doubt that the fact that I'm a happily single man has a lot to do with it - there's some underlying current at weddings that seems to be trying to tell the likes of me that I'm a sad lonely bastard because I'm not attached. Maybe that's it - the sheer smugness of the whole business. But in large part it all comes down to the fact that I hate all such large, organised, social gatherings.

At the end of the day, I tend to agree with my late father who once told me that he preferred funerals to weddings because "at least at funerals you don't have to pretend to be happy", (or buy presents, as my friend pointed out). Perhaps the only bit of wisdom he ever imparted to me that I truly took to heart. Family weddings are probably the worst - all those relatives you've been avoiding for decades, hoping that they'd die, not to mention all those new in-laws you'd ordinarily cross the street to avoid. I'm afraid that as I get older, I find that I have less and less interest in the majority of other people. Sadly, they increasingly seem to think that I should find their lives fascinating and consequently spend what seem like hours regaling me with details of them at this sort of occasion. That isn't to say that I haven't had some enjoyable experiences at weddings. A few years ago a friend of mine got married in Colchester (not a good start, I'll concede), and his father-in-law financed a genuinely free bar, which myself and another friend proceeded to drink dry. What astounded was that even as we sat at our table surrounded by pint glasses, people kept trying to get us to dance! "For God's sake woman, can't you see we're drinking?" became our refrain of the night.

Anyway, getting to the point, having been given this opportunity to come up with a good excuse, I wouldn't want to disappoint. So, gentle reader(s), I turn to you for inspiration - what are your suggestions for a truly innovative, yet cast iron, excuse for not attending a friend's wedding? Remember, we've got a year to come up with a good one! Frankly, though, I don't know why she simply doesn't do what most of my other friends do - just casually drop the fact she'd got married into conversation a few months after the event. Honestly, I really wouldn't be offended!