I remember, when i was younger, my brother used to say that he was going to organize a buck's night for me where I'd get drunk and he'd tie me down to a chair and I said, repeatedly, if I ever get married, I do NOT want a buck's party. Guess what my mother said? "You should be happy that your brother would want to organize a buck's party for you." What??!!!

I have long said that if I wanted to get married, I did not want a lavish wedding. I would be happy with a few guests, a gluten free cake and that's about it.

I have only been to two weddings in my lifetime, and in both cases, the bride was my aunty. One was in gardens, the other was at her house. I remember her third husband had a sound room that he showed my father, my uncle and I, and he turned the sound up and I put my fingers in my ears and I feared my father would be angry, but my uncle, seated to my right, also had his fingers in his ears.

My idea of a marriage proposal is inspired by some Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators books I read as an 11 year old. In one of them, there were seven parrots that led the investigators to a cemetery and the last clue was, "I never give a sucker an even break. And that's a lead pipe cynch." My idea would be to buy the ring and take Shigemi (my car) for a service and ask the mechanic to give me the oil filter box. I would then put the ring inside the box and take it to the cemetery and put it on a set of my great-great-grandparents' graves, and have the following clues. The proposal would come from her having to find a particular book, and she'd be given clues then of, "Page 45, Line 6, Word 9," for example. Then, she'd have a clue, "Look on the stone, above the bones, for the box without a lock." She'd then find a box with a lock on it and a box without a lock, and she'd have to open the oil filter box and then find a box with a ring in it.