Back again....

So, the Beard realises that he's spent nearly two whole months incommunicado... but just as you all are breathing a possibly collective sigh of relief, he goes and spoils it all by posting....

Now, the beard has had a lot on his hands and mind recently... for one thing, there is no longer a Future Mrs Beard... yes, to her horror and ultimate regret, the Beard has attempted to do the nearly decent thing, and the FMB is now simply Mrs Beard... the soon to be step beards are now fully fledged members of the Beardiness collective... yes, teh Beard and his lovely beautiful betrothed are now married... and are enjoying it all immensely... which is good....

It's definitely a time of newness for the Beard... not only does he have a beautiful new wife, but he has just returned from his first trip to Continental Europe, where he and his bride enjoyed a fantastic honeymoom in the old capital of the HRE and the current capital of the Czech Republic, Prague... the whole experience of which has led the Beard to despair at the literacy of banking staff, who, despite Prague being an incredibly popular destination, were not only wrongly convinced that the Czech currency is the Euro, but upon insistence that it was in fact the Czech Koruny, searched their little computers and were unable to find any reference to such a monetary unit... mainly down to their insistence on using the spellings Check and Cheque.... surely the hirsute one of Wiseness cannot be the first to ask for this currency... or do British holiday makers invariably find themselves having to change their Euros upon arrival....??

Prague, as stated, is a wonderful city... the Beard, being a fn of such things, loved the fuctionality of their public transport... why we can't have a similar integrated reliable and clean system over here is beyond me... but then so are a lot of things... and the Newly crowned Mrs Beard loved the place too, even the Skoda museum... but the Vltava, teh castle and the Vysehrad were spectacular... The Beard expresses great pleasure that his first ever journey by aeroplane and his first visit to the continent were to such a lovely place, and accompanied by such a beautiful young lady... and dave Themonkey of course....

Apart from the Beard's, another wedding apparently took place recently, between a certain Prince and his allegedly common girlfriend... now, the Beard has nothing against the pair personally, and if you were one of the millions who took some strange pleasure in watching the nuptials of two complete strangers when the weddings even of your closest friends actually (if you're honest) bored you to tears, well, I'm happy for you... personally, I went shopping... not due to any vehement anti-royalism ( for the beard believes in monarchy, of a sort) but simply because of a lack of interest in a strangers wedding... I often wonder why we can somehow summon up such emotion for people we have never met, when the deaths, births and marriages of those on our actual personal periphery, indeed, sometiimes of those fairly close, affect us so little... perhaps there is something in us that tries to keep some imagined weakness from the group, while allowing its release in safer surrounds... or maybe we've been brainwashed by the celebrity mill for far too long... after all, most of us probably spend more time with Katie Price and Cheryl Cole in our living rooms than we do with our aunt Vera... so probbaly we do actually feel closer to these vacuous and not so vacuous celebs than we do to our own kith and kin... but I digress...

My main problem with royalty in this country, or at least one of them, is that of cost... now, I'm not neccesarily saying that the queen et al should get a job... after all, she should leave them for those that need one... but when it comes to that monstrosity that is the civil list... well... am I the only person who thinks that maybe the Saxe Coburg Gothas (or Windsors, if you prefer..) don't actually need any more payments? Maybe, even just for five years, the list should be suspended, and they could live on the millions they've alreday got... after all, thats what a lot of poorer millionaires do... then the money could be spent on something worthwhile... like an integrated public transport system, perhaps...

But it grows early... the beard is tired, Mrs Beard is breathing softly in her marital sleep beside him, having retained her job, her honour, and, against all odds, her sanity... it remains only to say that defenestration still seems like a good idea, that married life is suiting the Beard down to the ground, and that until we can all integrate somehow, Wisebeard salutes you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!