Funny thing about getting married - it opens doors.

I don’t mean career-wise, or anything - it just weirdly allows conversations to happen between relative strangers which would otherwise have no place.

About getting married. About being married. Odd bits of advice, and stories, and theories. You suddenly get it all. It’s like a secret handshake. Relative strangers offer up curious nuggets of information, like cinder toffee.

Example: In a cab on the way home from a night out with friends, the driver asks where I’ve been. I mention that I’ve been out with friends to celebrate my forthcoming wedding. The driver tells me he’s been married for twenty seven years, most of it happily. He reckons that when you’ve been married twenty-five years, you ought to get a telegram from the queen. After all, he says, you get one when you turn a hundred, and all you have to do there is stay alive. Staying married is a lot harder these days.

So, from nowhere, random thoughts on wedded bliss from a Donegal-born cabbie.

It’s weddings, I tell you: they open a strange little door in people’s minds - the very mention of them legitimises random conversation about the deed.

You know what the best thing about our wedding is, though? It’s that it’s totally irrelevant. I mean, we don’t have to get married for tax, work, or domestic simplicity. There are no kids, animals or deeds to consider. We don’t need to legitimise our state of cohabitation; we don’t need a new toaster. There is, in fact, no practical reason to get hitched at all. And that leads inevitably to the most impractical reason of all: love. We have no reason to get married, except for love.

Now that’s what I call romantic.

Blame the Lacryma Christi de Vesuvio.