Blood, Sweat and Tears

Another week, another wedding. This time we are preparing to celebrate the nuptials of my boyfriend's elder sister and it has already proved to be a painful experience.

The sister has decided not to have a wedding list. Neither did the sister send out benevolent, warmhearted greetings to all of her guests saying that for them to be "present" at the ceremony is the only "present" that she requires to celebrate the day. So we really needed to get some sort of gift for her and her new husband. It would just be wrong not to. Now the boyfriend and his sister are not close, and to say that she and I do not get along well would be a serious understatement. We don't really know her and we certainly don't know the future Mr. Boyfriend's Sister, so shopping for them is difficult. Add to this anxiety the knowledge that the gift is likely to be opened in front of the massed throng of family and trendy, London-based thirty-somethings with critical eyes and you have a recipe for extreme stress.

The happy couple threw us a welcome life-preserving inflatable device, though, by planning to get married in the architectural madness that is Brighton Pavillion. I got the bright idea that a framed print of this iconic building might be a charming, lasting reminder of their vows. A quick internet search turned up many prints of John Nash's original pavillion studies, which were nice but not terribly exciting. Eventually I stumbled across a gallery in Brighton that offered a stunning reproduction of a painting of the pavillion by night, painted by a local artist. So we ordered the print and I must say that the service from the Window Gallery was excellent. It arrived really quickly and it is a thing of great beauty. I urge you to buy things from them. To save a few bob and add a personal touch to the gift, we just bought the print unframed and decided to frame it ourselves. I don't really urge you to do this.

We spent yesterday afternoon measuring, cutting, hammering and taking an unscheduled trip to the local craft store to buy white mounting board. White isn't just white, by the way - there are several different shades of white and the right white is very hard to find. Eventually we got to the stage where we could lift the mounted picture and glass front panel into the frame. It was here that we learned an important life lesson - the edges of glass are sharp. Just as everything slotted into place I noticed that the boyfriend was bleeding all over the mount, glass, frame and backboard. He went off in search of a plaster whilst I disassembled the frame and tried to clean up the attendant mess. The print, luckily, was fine, and most of the blood wiped off. The backboard, however, was rather porous and had a murderous red stain on it. We managed to cover this with the authenticity label detailing the artist's name, gallery address and print number - always buy your art from reputable galleries who give you such things! Then we started attempt number two at putting the picture together. Shifting the glass into position, I felt the corner graze my knee. It thought it was just a scratch, but as I looked down I saw my knee rapidly reddening as blood oozed from it. I limped off to get a plaster of my own, taking care to avoid the print in the process.

The print is now framed and it looks great. I'm sure the happy couple can't fail to like it and it's bound to go down well with the crowd. They'll never know the effort that went into it, though, or appreciate the minor catastrophes that befell us as we put it together for them. Still, I feel that we're really giving something of ourselves to them on their special day.