I'm going out tonight in a bee costume that is so skimpy it comes with its own yellow and black striped thong.
It's Jennie's hen do and as I'm here – having chosen the excuse “I'm afraid I can't afford it”, rather than “I'm afraid I'm busy that weekend” in front of a boyfriend desperately trying to make amends through his wallet – I have to play along.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Jennie, although I'd describe her as just a little over-exuberant. I also enjoy spending time with his youngest sister Jo, who has a wicked glint in her eye every now and then. But even more so now, I wonder what they think of me. What is this strange girl doing tagging along to someone else's family?
The hen do has been meticulously organised, not by a bridesmaid, but Jennie who bought everybody's train tickets three months in advance (it would have been earlier if advance tickets were available to buy before that). She has also made brownies and brought sweets for the journey down and packed three days ago.
I'm on a different train and have bought a couple of bottles of bubbly to calm her (OK I know you know I mean me) down when we get there.
I've always been nervous meeting Matt's family. I know they try to piece together our story, why I'm there, where I came from.
The first time I met them, we had gone to stay at his mum's house for the weekend. It was about month before Isobel was born and we were pretending nothing was out of the ordinary.
I arrived after a long day at work, four hours late after bursting a tyre emerging from pitch black country roads into a village draped in blinding Christmas lights and seeing the chicane just a little too late.
I have a knack for first impressions.
The next day we go as a group to view a house Jo and her boyfriend are looking to buy.
It has a small narrow room upstairs and Jennie exclaims: “This would make a lovely room for Izzy to stay in!”
Feeling a bit queasy I make my way outside. When there's no one else around: “So Izzy it is then? Ever going to tell me?”
“Oh I thought I did. Lizzie's decision.”
Next I met Matt's Grandad and step-grandmother, who they all dislike. Their mother's mother died in her 60s, and Grandad, who's now 80, remarried Margaret and moved to the middle of nowhere, where they enjoy sailing around in his boat.
Matt's Grandad is his idol and an awesome character. As a child, Matt went on sailing holidays with him and his grandmother before she died, adventuring on the Italian coast. He also funded him through private school after he got in on a choirboy scholarship. When I finally meet him, he's everything I've been told. An intelligent, kind gentleman who's been everywhere and done everything.
I'm terrified of him. I'm sure he's wondering who the hell I am and why I'm getting in between his great-grandchild's parents. Isobel's about four months old and I'd still never been allowed to see her. Matt started court proceedings to be allowed to take her away from Lizzie's house and had been visiting her less, and from what I could work out, stopped for a period, although we didn't speak of such things.
I'd been handed a glass of red wine and physically shuffled into the middle of the living room so I was standing on the burgundy rug, rather than the cream carpet, and later on Grandad sang On Ilkley Moor Bar Tat to find some common ground with me.
Since Grandad married Margaret, they don't see as much of him. She disapproves of them, but surely she can't wish they were like her own daughter's spoilt nasty twins, they say.
Upon our first meeting Margaret did actually tell me off. It may have been an overreaction, and it may have been more accommodating of her to have held her tongue. But I see a different Margaret to the one they do.
I'd turned up to the dinner party she was throwing for Grandad's 80th birthday with a vegetarian tart, as Matt had told me to do. I found out when the meat was being dished out that no one had explained to her that it was for me, rather than a slightly odd gift.
Margaret told off Matt, his mum and finally me and then had to go lie down.
The posh, old-fashioned lady had planned a big event for an important occasion with lots of people.
She's getting blinder by the day and this will probably be the last dinner party she throws. She can barely see the television and has to grip someone's hand when she crosses the road.
She was probably as nervous as I was about the occasion, seeing her step-grandchildren, who obviously dislike her.
Matt rolls his eyes at me. "She's a pain in the arse."
"The wicked step-grandmother?" He sees where I'm going and shuts up.
I knew part of why I was nervous to meet Margaret was the dredging up of a fear I'd tried to push down, but like the moles in that stupid arcade game with the hammer, kept popping up from a different hole I didn't expect.
Like at a friend's 30th birthday in the function room of a pub. Going outside to smoke I listen in on a 20-something girl complaining to her friend about how she hated her father's new wife. "She can't tell me what to do, she isn't my mother.” This is supposed to just be a cliché phrase from bad films. How old are you?
In Prague, Matt and I visited a section of the National Museum about Czech folk legends. One of the signs told the tale of a Lučan warrior called Straba:
"The Lučan Straba married a Czech girl, captured during one of their raids.
During the fateful battle, his stepmother, a seeress, warned him that he must kill the first Czech who attacks him, cut off his ears and immediately retire from the field of battle.
Straba did so and was the only Lučan who survived the battle, but back home, he discovered his dying wife with a wound in her side and ears cut off."
While I try to make out the point of the tale (don't they usually have a point?), Matt says: "It was the evil stepmother what done it."
Surely he ought to know better.
So, let me get this right, this Straba bloke marries a woman he's captured in a raid? These days that's called kidnap and rape, right?
Since he was the only Lučan to survive the battle, it seems like the "evil" stepmother actually gave the b*stard some sound advice.
And who's to say she wasn't murdered by a Czech who saw Straba disfigure their kinsman in such a way?
I can't find any further explanation about these events on Google. Does the storyteller think his simplistic version gives enough information to understand the tale? For some, like Matt, maybe that's it and I'm the one who's missing something.
Last time we went to Auntie Jennie's, it was so the oldest and youngest members of the family could meet.
Jennie was very excited about the occasion and it was naturally Margaret's fault, rather than Lizzie's, that Isobel was now ten months and they hadn't met sooner.
I knew the situation would not be a comfortable one. The step-grandmother, the not-even-stepmother, over-exuberant family members... I had planned to swerve the occasion in fact. I told Matt I'd join them after work and toyed with which excuse to use. But then I realised this was the last time I see Isobel for four weeks because of Matt's various other commitments. Suck it up.
I drove past the house three times, before I managed to stop.
In the restaurant, Margaret was delightful. She was enamoured by Isobel. The waiter told her she looked like his old maths teacher, who he didn't like. I divided up the bill exactly, so no money was left to give a tip.
But as I'm here now, waiting for the other train of hens to arrive, I'm thankfully quite excited. Our hotel has a swimming pool and spa I'm looking forward to making use of and having bought some shorts to cover my ass, and with my killer Kurt Geiger heels (another plea for forgiveness from Matt's wallet), this bee's going to have the best legs in town.
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