The struggle to book my wedding in Ireland

‘How does anyone young and stupid manage to get married?’ I kept shouting at the builder boyfriend as I pummelled the keys of my laptop to try to force the website of the registrar to give me a date.

It seems I picked the worst possible time to try to serve notice because, as anyone who has contacted a registrar lately will know, they are experiencing unprecedented demand for their services.

This dream I had of going down the local register office and getting quietly hitched with no fanfare was fading

Either there are record numbers of births or couples wanting to tie the knot, or this spike in excess death figures is really happening, and is not a figment of the conspiracy theorist’s imagination, nor has it been magically cured by the Office for National Statistics reframing the data recently by applying very clever calculus.

It is partly because so many of our acquaintances are dropping like flies that I want to ensure that the BB and I are each other’s next of kin. But I don’t want a wedding.

My history with weddings is not ideal. I got engaged in my thirties and called it off at the last minute, which did at least make for a sizeable chunk of a comic memoir.

Although it has good reviews, along with a novel I emitted shortly afterwards, in terms of sales I only know that I once discovered a heap of royalty statements in shreds down the back of the sofa.

They had been grabbed from the doormat repeatedly and eaten by the dog. She never did that with any other mail and I can only conclude she was trying to protect me. Out of loyalty, she ate my royalties.

Point is, because I cancelled a wedding, even if I did get a two-book deal out of it, this one has to be a simple, straightforward affair. I don’t care how or where, although it would be nice to have it in the garden of our new home in Ireland.

Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that I can’t get married here unless I first negotiate quite possibly the worst website ever in order to book the appointment to give notice.

Page after page of tiny print, culminating in a miniature diary where you have to select a date, but no matter what you click it tells you that date is not available. I tried random dates for the next three years and none of them worked.

I rang the phone line which told me the phone line was not manned. The office was open at these hours, said the recorded voice, but don’t come in without an appointment. To book an appointment, please go to… and it gave the address of the website where there wasn’t an appointment for three years, or indeed 33 if you put in the date 2057, for a laugh.

I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau and a timid lady grappled with the infernal thing for an hour until she was in tears and I had to tell her to leave it – honestly, it didn’t matter, marriage was over-rated.

I decided to send an email to a registrar in a city two hours’ drive away, and Orla rang me. She could book me an appointment to serve the three months’ notice there on the last day of April, but they were booked for weddings until the end of October, so I would have to find another venue and celebrant, and inform them of it when I came. No, I could not get married in the garden. It had to be a building with four walls. No, not in the house either, unless it’s certified as a commercial venue.

The BB, banging in fence posts as I stood beside him on the phone, suggested the local carvery where we go for Sunday lunch. ‘I don’t want to get married in the middle of a queue for roast beef!’ I told him. Sweating as he heaved the fence banger over a post, he replied by bashing down to make a deafening ‘boiing!’ sound.

This unromantic dream I had of going down the local register office and getting quietly hitched with no fanfare was fading into nowhere. I took the notice appointment, which gave me two weeks to come up with a complete wedding plan.

The last ditch desperation method that only then occurred to us was the Catholic church. We had assumed the priest would be the least likely person to want to marry us. But in desperation I rang and left Father a voice message and to my amazement he replied by text, telling me to ring him next week.

I’ve now got five days to come up with a plausible story as to why the BB and I have been going to mass every Sunday like we’re husband and wife, when we’re not. Why are we not married? If I knew, I’d tell him.