A Family Announcement

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My brother is getting married. A few things about this:

(1) There seems to be no reason at all why he's doing it.
(2) There seems to be no reason why he's doing it in a cold foreign country.
(3) We don't want to go.

Now, my brother's been happily living with his girlfriend for years. Neither of them has any desire for children, nor any deeply held superstitions about the need for marriage, nor any legal or cultural reasons to start calling themselves Mr and Mrs. They're just...doing it.

Which is to say, they're taking a long weekend holiday, and getting married along the way. Which involves making promises they've no intention of keeping about raising children, to a god neither believes in.

The wedding is in Helsinki - apparently inside a chapel that is also somehow an igloo. That part may have got garbled somewhere along the line. The journey is a two hour train ride to the airport, followed by a twelve hour flight, followed by a four hour flight, followed by a car drive to a hotel.

And the same back again two days later.

I'd quite like to see Helsinki, in the same vague way I'd like to see Mount Rushmore and the Moscow Underground. But I don't especially want to spend 40 hours travelling for a quick tour. I've been in enough aeroplanes to know they're (1) uncomfortable, (2) really uncomfortable after the first two hours, and (3) all pretty much the same.

The guest list so far consists of:
* My mother
* My father
* Me
* The bride's mother
* One of my brother's friends

So, quite a low-key affair - and no particular reason to go through the legal hell of getting the paperwork to get married in a country where you're not a citizen.

Fortunately, I've got a reason not to go - namely, five dogs and three parrots to look after. Unfortunately, I've also got two parents with their eye on the same reason - and only one of us can use it.

Families. Society's gentle introduction to crazy people.

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