Tonight's the night (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Tonight's the night

12:13pm Saturday 10th February 2007

• Print
• Email

As Rod Stewart sang, admittedly about a subject that is not quite suitable for a family website. All is ready or well in hand for the ball tonight. I had my speech written and rehearsed in midweek. Yesterday on the way home on the bus, I ripped it up and started again. The original was toe-curlingly schmaltzy. That’s the last time I let Mr Leffe help me with a speech. I’ve gone back to first principles now: Stand up, speak up, shut up, sit down. There are times when a long speech is called for, but this isn’t one of them. I try to remind myself that I’ve never set off for an event thinking “great, the Mayor is going to make a speech – I can’t wait”. I doubt anyone else has, either.

I had a bit of an embarrassing moment in Walter Rose’s this morning. A couple of weeks ago, my credit card company called me about a couple of odd transactions. It seems that whilst I was serving at my beer festival I’d spent £10 in Harrrogate and 41 seconds later tried to buy £300 worth of something that looked like dodgy insurance online. Hats off to M&S Money for spotting the attempted fraud. Anyway, they issued me with a new card. I activated it over the ‘phone and then got a balance to check every was OK. It was. But when I tried to pay in the butcher’s, it came back “Invalid PIN”. Lucky I had the cash on me … and about 70p to spare.

One of my guest tonight is my old friend from College (it’s now a university, doncha know!), a Scot by the name of Roddy. He’ll be wearing his kilt. As he was at his wedding. Where I was best man. For the day, I was allowed to wear the tartan. But, being en enlightened Englishman, I referred to it as a ‘Jock Frock’. This would have been OK as a joke amongst friends. But Roddy decided to share it with the all the guests in his speech. All the guests with their skeandhus. Lucky that they’re a civilised and understanding bunch, the Scots. No faux pas like that for me tonight, I hope.

To give the song its full title "Tonight's The Night (Gonna Be Alright)."