Trying to organise to get married is very much like trying to organise to have a plumber around or to have a parcel delivered – only more protracted. But what these activities all have in common is the assumption that someone, probably me, is going to be at home with time on their hands and be ready, willing and able to run around to collect things or deliver them or receive them.

In the first place, you need both to be free at the same time to visit the registrar in the district in which you live to declare who you are and demonstrate that you live where you say you live and that you aren’t wishing to marry for fraudulent reasons or even bigamously. OK. That makes sense – though it is frustrating that the latest appointment you can have is at 3pm. But then, two weeks later someone has to find the time to go back to the register office and collect certificates authorising you to be wed. And THEN, someone has to deliver the certificates to the register office where you are actually going to be married (which in our case is in the county but not the same district) so they can do whatever it is they need to do to process them.

The Bakewell Register office is only little and only open part time hours.

This would seem to require that someone (probably me) is going to have to take two half days off in order to chase pieces of paper around the county.

You would think they could do all this subsequent stuff electronically. They’ve got computers. I’ve seen them using them!

I decided (not realising I was going to have to go on the paper chase) to have all of yesterday off. I couldn’t see any point in going all the way to Sheffield at the crack of dawn just to turn around and come back again at lunch time. The Builder did go in for the morning. But he doesn’t get paid when he takes time off (apart from his annual leave) and I do.

So he trundled into Sheffield and I trundled into the garden where I had a lovely time pottering about. When he got back we went to the Wingerworth library and into Chesterfield and trawled around the market and generally mooched about, visited the Chesterfield Register Office, mooched about some more and went home. It was quite a nice day – for me at least.

Wasn’t a nice day for poor Tammy next door. One of her school chums drowned in a disused quarry on Sunday afternoon. Now you can understand a bunch of teenagers pushing their way in through a hole in the fence and ignoring the padlock on the gate and all the signs warning people not to enter and emphatically not to swim in the quarry. That’s what teenagers do. The wonder is that so many teenagers survive to adulthood. But it seems to me to be reckless in the extreme when grown ups do the same thing – and take their young children with them. But this is what the news reports say had happened. The disused quarry was positively bustling with illicit swimming it seems. Poor Tammy’s young friend was very unlucky, given that so many people were around him. But I am told that by the time people realised he was really in trouble and not just larking about, it was too late. Tammy, BTW, was not there at the time. She was at home revising for her GCSE exams which have just started.

I keep being asked how old other people are. How am I supposed to keep track of how old people are? They keep having birthdays!!