Who's The Daddy: ​A quarter of a century older and only one of us is wiser

​About a month before we got married in the Ashton Memorial in April 1998, yours truly slipped a disc in his back.

The Poet Laureate would struggle to put that niche brand of agony into words.

Kicked by a Derby winning horse every 30 seconds is my best effort.

If I could give one piece of advice to anyone with an impending wedding, it is this.

Don’t slip a disc a month before you get married, especially if you didn’t have the foresight to take out cancellation insurance first.

The DJ at our evening do even broadcast to all the guests that it’s usually the blushing bride who’s in a delicate condition, not the groom, as I shuffled around on our first dance like a half-cut Honey Monster.

Still, two weeks of Caribbean honeymoon sunshine helped no end and 25 years, two kids, two dogs, two cats and The Stone Roses’ debut album bought on four different formats later, here we are.

A quarter of a century older and only one of us any the wiser.

There’s a lot of divorces in journalism.

The unsociable hours and the howling lunatics the profession attracts might have something to do with it. So to get to 25 years feels like a genuine achievement. Maybe I should give Guinness a call?

They say you either win or you learn, and I’ve learnt this, which should be tattooed on every gormless groom’s chest in letters an inch high the second they’ve got the ring on their finger - backwards, so they can read it in the mirror every day of their lives. Listen to your wife, she knows you better than you know yourself.

If you get hitched to a solid-gold superstar like I did, your wife will gently steer you away from whatever idiocy you’re perpetually drawn towards, without you ever realising just how close you were to a cack-handed, yet newsworthy, death worthy of a Darwin Award.

So, here’s to the boss, fantastic wife and amazing mother who raised two great kids to adulthood, while I followed specific and detailed instructions to the letter like a clueless apprentice to a master craftsman, just happy to be learning at the elbow of a genius.

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