THERE is, apparently, a growing trend for people to marry themselves in Japan.
"Do you take yourself to be your lawfully wedded partner, to love and care for yourself, in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer, as long as you alone will live?"
"I do."
"Then I pronounce you joined in marital bliss. You may kiss yourself."
Solo weddings in the Japanese city of Kyoto have captured a niche market for single women. A two day package with hotel, dress, flowers and ceremony can cost about $2,500. The company says it is designed to help women have positive feelings about themselves. Really? It also appears to be catching on in America. Well, where there's a buck to be made?
Now that women have discovered the joy of walking down the aisle alone, it's only a matter of time before blokes follow their example in this age of equality. Actually, I can see certain advantages of men marrying themselves.
No one will shout at them for leaving up the toilet lid, being home late from the office smelling of drink, leaving their socks and dirty underwear on the bedroom floor, living on a diet of take-away meals and having a 52 inch 3-D television that will only receive sports programmes and Playboy TV.
And it might give an air of mystery to a chap who wed himself if he subsequently embarks on an extra marital affair with a woman. "We'll have to be discreet. I'm a married man, you know."
For ladies, the attraction may be in being able to spend a weekend in bed with the complete boxed set of Downton Abbey, eat as much chocolate as they like and never have to ask their other half: Does my bum look big in this?
But we all have two sides to our personalities, don't we? The cautious and the wild? The angel and the devil? That alone could be a a recipe for disaster.
"I think I'll decorate the bedroom," says the newly married bride. "Pink walls, white furniture and fluffy cushions."
"Over my dead ego," says her soul mate. "I want red and black. Dramatic and sexy, like Christmas underwear."
"Oh, I don't think I could live with that."
"Then move out, dear, because that's the way it's going to be."
How long before the first solo divorce?

SURVEYS are always a source of fun. Well, they make me laugh. A pub chain funded research to discover the secret of a happy home and came up with a list of 30 factors that ranged from “enjoying time together as a family” to having a garage. A garage, apparently, is a source of delight? With or without a garage, the average mum and dad rated their family's happiness at eight out of 10. There was no mention about how much money you needed.
“There is a myth,” quoted an expert, “that money can bring happiness – it is far from the truth.”
Yet in another survey that probed people's regrets, four of the top six responses related to a lack of cash. Bizarrely, in the same top 50 list of what people would do differently if they had the chance, number 40 was: Have children earlier, 41: Have children, 42: Have more children, and 43: Have more one night stands. Well, that would do it.
Results from surveys, rather than discovering some scientific insight into human behaviour, sometimes prove that people are wonderfully daft. Eleven per cent of those asked thought HTML (a term familiar with anyone who has a computer) was a sexually transmitted disease, 27% identified "gigabyte" as an insect commonly found in South America, 23% thought an "MP3" was a Star Wars robot, and 18% said "Blu-ray" was a marine animal.
Surveys and quizzes are dominant on social media for people to share with their friends, inviting them to waste 10 minutes of life in an attempt to discover which sandwich they are or which Harry Potter character is their doppelgänger.
Purely in the interests of purely unscientific research, I undertook a couple and discovered the celebrity I most resemble is Michael Jackson which is strange, as I haven't had cosmetic surgery and am not dead. Another said my dominant trait was sensitivity, and a third that my inner child's name was Funky Baby.
I only hope the next time I go to the pub nobody calls me Funky Baby and asks me to do the Moon Walk. I'm so sensitive I might thump them.
Oh, and by the way, my Harry Potter character is Albus Dumbledore: “Not only are you incredibly intelligent, but you're also really good at dishing out sage advice. You have a bit of an ambitious dark side, but ultimately you're all about the power of love.”
Couldn't have put it better myself.

THE age of the robot is fast approaching. Researchers suggest they will replace hundreds of jobs in the next few years with telemarketers most under threat, which is good news as I'm fed up of Jeffrey and Sharon phoning from Mumbai to sell me a replacement boiler. I'd much rather have a Stephen Hawking's sound-alike making the automated pitch, wait until the end, and then press 8 to be removed from their call list. Robotics already play a big part in life, from flashing a credit card over a till for a contactless payment, to putting your car through an automated wash, and being put on hold to listen to Vivaldi for half an hour after having chosen from 27 options whilst trying to make human contact at a multi national company. Robots are on production lines, driver-less cars are being developed, automatic pilots fly planes, supermarkets are pushing customers towards self service tills and robot chefs have been programmed to produce dishes, which is a pointless exercise, as they will soon be superseded by customers pressing a button on a menu and waiting for it to slide out of a chute after being nuked in a microwave. In some pub kitchens that already happens. Amongst those most at risk are typists and legal secretaries, hand sewers, tellers, credit analysts, telephone operators, filing clerks, ushers, lobby attendants, ticket takers, cooks and nuclear power reactor operators. Surprisingly, fashion models are also among them so we should appreciate Kate Moss and Rosie Huntinton-Whiteley before they are replaced by tubular clothes horses. Umpires and referees are similarly doomed, for which sportsmen everywhere will probably offer a libation to Nike, who was the Greek god of Victory before she started selling running shoes. The research comes from Oxford University and Deloitte and assessed nine key skills of each job, which included social perceptiveness, negotiation and persuasion. Those that required more “human-like” skills were deemed to have less of a chance of automation. About 35% of jobs were said to be at risk in the next 20 years Actors are reasonably safe with only a 37.4% doom factor, journalists are way down the list at 11%. Safest of the lot are much of the medical profession, choreographers, teachers, composers, photographers, fashion designers and the clergy. Mind you, how long before you can dial-a-prayer? What? Oh, you already can, apparently. In America.


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  Kanye West already has a daughter called North (North West, get it?) and it is reported his next child will be named Easton. When will this modern fad for bizarre names end? Except that it's not so modern.
Woollen spinner Sidney Sykes and his wife Betty of Huddersfield had a large brood of children in the mid 19th century. The 1851 Census notes that among them were sons Dowell, Livewell, Diewell and Fairwell. Odd but at least they ring with sincere hopes for their future in the poverty and squalor of the world in which they lived. and are eminently more sensible than celebrity children called Tu Morrow or Ocean.
Mind you, Victorians also had a sense of humour, daftness and pretensions of grandeur.
Genealogy firm Fraser and Fraser released some of the best earlier this year. How about the poor little lad in 1886 who was named That's It Who'd Have Thought It. Perhaps the baby was a surprise? He later changed his name to George. Mr and Mrs Johnson opted to call their offspring King Arthur in 1885, Thomas Day named his son Time Of in 1899, which was apparently a family tradition. Poor little Friendless Baxter was baptised in 1871, the Goldstones called their latest child One Too Many in 1870, and Mr and Mrs Cope named their son Leicester Railway in 1863 because he was born there in a railway carriage.
Other odd names, from a registrar's list published in the Westmorland Gazette in 1850, include Loyal Thomas Inkpen, Zaphnathpaaneah Drayson, Repentance Taylor, Prince Albert Garmon, Matilda French Onion, sisters Emma Tuesday Taylor and Eliza Thursday Taylor (guess which days they were born on?) and the delightful Happy George Dadd.
Maybe Easton and North West are not so odd after all.

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THE world will end in three weeks, according to Puerta Rican prophet Efrain Rodriguez. Or maybe four. He says a space rock is hurtling towards Earth and will hit the Caribbean between September 21 and 28 and unleash devastation across the planet.
This does not leave much time to compile a bucket list and fulfil all those pie in the sky ambitions you might have had. Of course if, in three weeks, we are to end up AS pie in the sky, it might be worth trying.
Too late, for instance to sell the house and spend the money. It would take more than three weeks painting and decorating and tackling all the maintenance jobs you never get round to doing.
And wouldn't it be annoying if you got everything done in record time and said to the wife: 'The house is in its best shape for years' only for her to say: 'The BBC says a space rock has hit the Caribbean, there's a 100 foot tsunami coming up the Huddersfield Narrow Canal at half past two, acid rain is predicted for the next three weeks and the Pennine Fault is due to fracture off the Richter Scale.'
'I didn't know the Pennines had a fault?'
'Well, they do now.'
A better bet might be to check how much you've got on credit cards and book an instant holiday. You could even pick the Caribbean and get a ringside seat at a beach bar and toast the arrival of the apocalypse with a bottle of Bacardi or three.
Or you might prefer a couple of weeks in Benidorm, swim with dolphins in Florida, or pay for a three week lock-in at your local for an end of the world party.
“The drinks are on me!”
The prediction is linked to the Blood Moon Prophecy. This sounds like a human sacrifice at midnight but is actually a series of four lunar eclipses: the first occurred in April last year and the fourth will happen later this month. During the eclipse the moon appears red. This has been biblically interpreted by religious odd-balls as a sign of the “end times” as predicted in Revelations.
Oo-er missus.
Of course, the likelihood is that the end of the world will not happen. Paul Chodas of space agency Nasa says: “There is no scientific basis, not one shred of evidence, that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact on Earth on those dates.”
Phew. That's a relief.
I'm now considering the legal possibilities. I could still go on a two week holiday in the sun, come back and take over my local pub for the weekend for an "end times" party. If the world doesn't end and everyone has to go to work on the Monday will I have grounds to sue Efrain Rodriguez for the cash outlay on the grounds that he has committed a fraudulent deception?
And if, in his defence, he says I'm just being silly, well, he started it.

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