No thanks. Yours, God.

For those of you who don't know me (which gathering from the readership of this blog isn't very many of you), some woman has been daft enough to ask me to marry her. Admittedly, I've been living in sin with this woman for more than twelve years now, but still.

To elaborate a little more, I've been married before. I was very young, naive and, with the benefit of hindsight being 20-20 as it is, very very stupid. The marriage didn't even last four years and ended due to me finding out she was sleeping with my best friend at the time - a situation that doesn't make for an ideal marriage, I'm sure you'll agree.

I've grown up a lot since then, and am quite confident that I want to spend the rest of my life with Tara. If only because I've spent a good third of it with her so far, and it's not been all that bad.

Now the problem is that Tara is a Catholic and I'm an athiest. We've discussed it before and came to the compromise that I wouldn't want a full religious service, but that I'd happily have the marriage blessed - for the sake of Taras faith and her beliefs.

Tara emailed the priest of our local Catholic church a short while ago to be told that even a blessing was "problematic". She went to speak to him about this, and was told that even though I'm divorced I'm still officially married in the eyes of God. This strikes me as being unfair, because I can even show God the paperwork that shows him I'm legally divorced - even though being omnipresent, he's more than likely already seen it, so it just seems like stubborn behaviour on His part. Apparently. I can get it 'annulled' by the Church, but - and the key point is that Tara agrees with this - why should I? I did get married - the mistakes I made then shaped me and made me the person I am today - so why should I deny in the eyes of the Church that it ever took place?

All in all I feel sorry for Tara. A faith she's upheld and defended for most of her life has let her down in this simplest of requests. I can be my cynical old self and say "Ho,ho, I bloody knew that would happen. Bloody religion". Pathetic rules written by stubborn old men interpreting the fictional words of some bloody bearded sky wizard.

So Sod it, a non secular service it will be - and it'll all the better for it. If God thinks he's getting an invite now, he can bloody well think again.