THE 50(ISH) GREATEST ALBUMS OF ALL TIME
Such A Perfect Day, I’m Glad I Spent It With You
Album #42 : Lou Reed — Transformer
What a perfect day. What an amazing wife. What an exceptionally lucky man I am. I got married last week and it was everything I could have wished for and more. I am so grateful to everyone who came and everyone who sent nice messages — but most of all I am grateful to my wonderful wife, who makes me happy every single day.
It’s funny, when we had to delay thanks to covid I felt incredibly frustrated at not being able to get married. But being able to do it this way, clear of any regulations (or to put it another, more selfish, way, “do it properly”) was just perfect. At times it felt like the whole room was experiencing some kind of relief – we are not out of the woods yet, obviously, but things do seem to be getting back to normal. Or, as one rather drunk punter eloquently put it to me; “dancing at a wedding! Brilliant!”
I will admit to a similar feeling of relief now that the wedding has passed. Not in a “off my shoulders” kind of way, but in a “we have our whole lives ahead of us” way. We have worked up to this wedding for such a long, long time – now it has happened we’ve both admitted to a sort of instant mental clarity. We don’t know what’s to come next and that is very exciting.
Speaking of mental clarity, lots of people say that your wedding day flies in and that you never get to see your bride. For me, neither of those things were true. I felt fortunate enough to be able to properly take in each stage of the day, savouring it. All the way from being outside the church and asked every 45 seconds if I was nervous (I wasn’t, until you asked, thanks) straight through to being chucked into the air in final throes (throws?) of the evening. And everything in between.
Obviously, the ‘in between’ amounts to quite a lot. More than I can possible go into detail about here, but one of the highlights were the speeches. I know I am biased, but I think all of our speeches were some of the best I’ve ever heard. The punchline hit-rate in my father in law’s speech was terrifying. Who’s got to follow this guy?! Oh, it’s me.
I’d like to say my speech was more emotional than intended but it was, in fact, exactly how I knew it would be. I knew I would cry at three moments (telling my in-laws I’d always felt like I had family close during lockdown, telling my parents I wanted my future family to be like our current one, and telling my wife (my wife!) she makes me happy every single day and I want to spend the rest of my life doing the same for her) — I hit every note with a wavering vibrato.
The biggest cry of the day, though, came at 7:30am. My mum delivered a gift from my bride and a card with it. The card had such a beautiful message in it that I just sat on the bed and cried. Fortunately, the gift was an embroidered handkerchief!
Happy tears were not the overwhelming emotion, though. That was a hard-fought tie between pure love and gratitude. I said it to many people on the day, and since, but I am so, so thankful to people for making it to our wedding. As I said in my speech, we have been to enough weddings to know that they are not cheap. So thank you to all of you who came, and all of you who didn’t, it is really appreciated.
I could honestly write all day about last Friday. It was, in the truest sense of the word, amazing. I have never felt so loved. On that I had a thought — why do we wait until days like that to tell each other we love them? We should tell our friends we love them. Tell our wives, our husbands. Tell our brothers and sisters and cousins and their other halves. Tell them all. You know it, they know it, but tell them anyway… just in case they’d forgotten.
As an aside, it feels a bit harsh on this album that it got picked this week — anything was inevitably going to play second fiddle to the wedding — it is a very good album and you should go give it a listen.
Thanks for reading — over the course of 2021, I’ll be reviewing 50(ish) of the greatest albums ever recorded. You can see the list here:
There is also a playlist featuring the best song from each album here.
