I KNOW the value of everything and the price of nothing.

Sometimes, in vacant or in pensive mood, I try to decide what I believe is the actual worth of something.

Take the footer. To see my team is worth, I believe, £8.50. This is for 90 minutes in the cold, surrounded by swearing, unhappy people eating portions of limp pizza from unpleasant plastic cartons. The actual cost? Twenty-three of your Earth pounds last time I looked. That is why I, and thousands like me, no longer go.

You cannot explain this to the people who run football because an essential qualification for that job is being irredeemably dim.

But there you go. We'll just see what happens, as managers invariably say at interviews, because there's only so much you can say about football.

As it happens, I'll never marry now. Not since reading that the cost of the day is £19,500.

I'd have put it at £500 max, including small sausage rolls and relatively outré clothing: grey tracksuit bottoms from Jenner's perhaps.

Luckily, I never married because of a phobia about being the centre of attention and after learning that one was expected to make a speech. Instead, I went in for about five or six live-in, long-term relationships that turned out to be short.

Never had to make a speech once. Marvelous. And I'm nearly 20 grand up on the deal. Yay, I'll buy a new car and some warm hats for the winter.

The census by the Scottish Wedding Directory, presumably an alphabetical list of potential spouses that you might wish to telephone, reveals that around 40 per cent of brides and grooms paid for their own wedding.

The rest of the time the burd's old man is expected to put in overtime down the mine.

What a palaver. How can it come to 20 grand? For that price, I'd expect my groom's hat to be covered in live meerkats capering amidst gold-encrusted foliage.

Still, I suppose people will think it worth it for their "special day" of kilted poltroonery and vomiting uncles. Carping on about the price ignores the value or meaning of the event.

I envy those who can carry off a day like that with aplomb, looking sparkly and speaking with authority and wit. To them it is money well spent. But I'll still take the car and winter millinery.