Mark Daniels: This Saturday...

This Saturday, I have a family wedding to go to. In Norwich.

Now, if you're a publican with a well-meaning extended family, like me, then you'll be aware that everybody supports you as a publican, understands you work long hours for relatively little remuneration, and that Saturdays are not a good day for you to take off. Until it comes to family events, it seems, at which point they tend to forget you can't always get off on a Saturday.

Last year, my brother and his wife got married in the lovely Scottish town of Hawick. On a Saturday. In August.

Possibly. The. Worst. Time. Of. Year. For. A. Publican.

Much as my wife and I wanted to attend the event as a family, what actually happened was that I had to drive from my little pub in Chippenham, Suffolk, to the venue in Hawick, attend the wedding and then drive back again. I chose to drive because, even though the car I had then was a gas-guzzling 4-litre Jeep (and oh, how I miss that!), it was both cheaper and quicker to get from point-to-point than using any other form of public transport I could get to. Amazing, considering we're all supposed to be getting out of our cars these days.

And doing such a long journey in such a short space of time meant leaving the kids behind too - it was just unfair to put an eight- and five-year old through that amount of tedium and my choice of music; it would have been unfair on me, too! But I wanted to attend the wedding, so we made it work.

This time, though, we had thought we could all make it - with the wedding planned for a Saturday in the middle of November, traditionally a quiet time of the year for us, it seemed like it might be feasible for us to put on a skeleton staff and actually attend as a normal family unit.

This excited my mum (God bless her, love her to bits) quite a bit, as she likes a good family bash and she's quite fond of pointing out that we haven't all been together as a family since Herod the Great was a lad.

Unfortunately, however, my aunt (God bless her, love her to bits) planned the wedding around the time that Harold was getting poked in the eye with an arrow and therefore had absolutely no idea that, this Saturday, there will be an International Rugby Union match between England and Argentina, followed almost immediately by one of those football thingumies between England and Brazil.

And that means that, this particular Saturday in what is normally a quiet month, the pub will be a tad busy. Fortunately, Norwich isn't as far from me as Hawick so I can still take the kids with me, but Ali's going to have to stay behind - and, as this is the second family event in a row she's had to miss, my mum's probably beginning to think that my wife doesn't like her any more!

It also means I won't be able to stay for the evening as I'm having to pull what staff I can get hold of to cover the daytime. And, as I have to do the driving now, I won't even be able to have a beer with the rellies before heading home.

I figured I could fit it all in snugly in to the day, but my mum's just told me that there's a football game in Norwich tomorrow, too, so now I have to get there even earlier in order to catch a bus (I hate public transport) so that I don't have trouble parking!

For my family, like so many of us in this industry, special events just can't happen on a Saturday easily if they want the publican members of the clan to attend. The next time an aunt/sister/third-cousin-twice-removed decides to get married, I'm going to tell them to do it on a Monday. In the depths of a freezing winter.

That way, we can all attend!