Three weeks, three incompetent weeks to find out how to compose a second blog. I had to "sign in", ha! I'm having second thoughts about going around the World, given that it takes me three confused weeks to find out that  I have to sign in to discover the "compose" button.

Today I finished work, not for the weekend like you lot, but for 2 years, by which time I expect to be able find out how to read my emails and print Google map directions. I've ordered my travelling companion, he's beautiful and has a name, he's called The Edge because he's Uke 2. Groan all you like, I'm not calling him Bono!

http://www.goughanddavy.co.uk/product_desc.php?id=885    is where you will find his portrait. Click on this link, you will see a large photo of him, but to the left is a small one. Click on the small one and he will come and show you himself at his glorious glossy best. He's bigger than my other Uke because, despite what we are told by a kind society, size does matter.  My other travelling companions, the twin spoons are still reluctant to show themselves in case they are imprisoned back in the evil, forbidding castle from which they were "liberated".  Maybe when we reach a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with Scotland, and in particular, Stirling, they will parade their binary beauty.

Sunday 19th August will be my 35th wedding anniversary. If we had managed to stay together longer  than it takes to produce a second blog, we would now be receiving gifts made of Jade. We barely made it to our first anniversary when one traditionally recieves gifts of paper. (Cash or cheques will do nicely, thank you!)

It wasn't a traditional honeymoon, the bride and groom in some romantic location, sickeningly engrossed only in each others gaze while holding hands across a candle lit table.  We could only afford Auntie Norah's caravan in wet and windy Cleethorpes. Along with the sexy negligee, my wife had brought her 2 kids and the family dog, Jandy.

Jandy was a 6 month old Labrador cross bitch. She, unfortunately, was in season for her first time. I'd been advised by the vet to allow this passage to adulthood before having her "dressed".  Nature chose the week of our honeymoon to bless us with the circumstance that attracted horny, howling, hounds from as far afield as Skegness and Grimsby.

 In an act I considered to be thoughtful and romantic, in a week that so far had been lacking the latter,  I woke her early on the fourth morning, before the kids had woken up and the pack of persistent, puppy producing pooches had emerged from under the surrounding caravans where they skulked expectantly hoping to be the first to act in a moment of dropped guards..

I'd prepared her breakfast and a cup of tea for both of us. I never would have thought this would almost produce the premature dissolution of our nuptial bliss. Bleary eyed, but beautiful, she sat across the Formica covered caravan table as I spooned sugar into my tea. I'll never understand how my next action, something she'd witnessed countless times during our courtship, could create the vitriolic look of anger and hatred that overwhelmed the face of my beautiful wife. "That's it!" she spat viciously in a voice as gutteral as Glasgow drunk who's drink you'd just across the table, "I cannot stand the way you stir your tea, It's over!!!"

She exploded from Auntie Nora's honeymoon love-nest, dogs fleeing in all directions from this furious nightdress striding across the caravan park towards the distant red phone box who's colour matched her enraged complexion. I arrived as she dialled her Mother and Father's home in Hull. "Come and get me and the kids." She demanded, "I can't stand it any more."  I was in a state of shock and despair, otherwise I might have reminded her to include the menstruating dog.

Unfortunately for me, although I didn't see it that way at the time, he declined to aid her escape form marital mayhem in true Yorkshire fashion. "You've made yer bed....." He didn't need to finish the sentence.  Old Yorkshire men are creatures of few words and seldom have to finish their sentences to be understood. He'd already hung up the phone.

Our marriage managed to flail like a drunken man with a drum, falling down a flight of stairs to halt as abruptly half way between the paper and cotton anniversaries. I left home one morning, the latest threat of separation looming large for the umpteenth and final time and consulted a lawyer in my lunchtime. On the long bus journey home that very night, I met the girl with whom I would spend the next fourteen years. We are still good friends and have frequent contact. Unlike my wife, who I never saw again, although many years later I learned she was a serial bride and divorcee, I was the second in a very long line.

In a beautiful bouquet of irony, for which I will be eternally grateful,  the decree absolute, the ultimate coup de gras in what had become a long forgotten period of my "eventful" life, was granted on the fourth anniversary of our wedding, a welcome change from the fruit or flowers that are the more traditional gifts on such an occasion. On Sunday 19th August 2012 I will be able to celebrate the 31st anniversary of my divorce, not my wedding. HAPPY DIVORCE DAY!!