Joy!

Oh joy! Happiness, gladness, glee, delight, elation, jubilation ... you get the drift of my mood.

The children went back to school this morning. Home schooling is at an end. The house is quiet and I am calm - at least until 3.30pm.

A world record and a royal wedding

The Kingdom is abuzz with excitement as Bahrain is on track for its first ever entry into the Guinness Book of World Records. What for? Well that's the bit that's not so exciting - it's for having the most signatories on a cyber electronic card. Yes, really.

"Royal wedding card may set record" ran the headline in the local press. More than 3000 well-wishers have so far signed an e-congratulations cybercard marking the marriage of Shaikh Nasser, the King's fourth son. Contacts are underway for this "unprecedented achievement" to be officially registered as a world record.

When I was a girl, I used to receive the latest copy of the Guinness Book of Records each Christmas and marvel over the world's tallest building, fastest athlete or fattest man (he was always the best photo) but I'm not sure as a 9-year-old I would have been even a teensy bit titillated to know which greeting card had the most signatures, cyber or otherwise.

Personally I am far more interested in the event which generated this record attempt - the Royal wedding. Shaikh Nasser is a good-looking bloke, sporty (he leads the Bahrain National Endurance Team in all matters equestrian), a poet (he's apparently published countless poems) and loaded (obviously).

If this had been Europe, his and his bride-to-be's faces would have been plastered on mugs, tea towels and postcards in every souvenir shop for months beforehand; there would have been endless analysis of the couple and their compatibility; and comprehensive TV coverage of The Big Day.

Yet I struggled to find anything about the wedding in the Bahrain press beyond a rather stuffy photograph of the groom, his father and his new father-in-law, Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the Ruler of Dubai.

Of course, this being the Middle East, weddings are celebrated rather differently with separate, totally segregated, parties for the bride and the groom. Still, even if there was no picture of her, it would have been nice to at least know the bride's name, instead of her being only referred to in the press as "a daughter of Shaikh Mohammed."

Yet even as I felt my feminist hackles rising, I wondered whether - religious requirements aside - there was not some sense in keeping the identity of a Royal bride under wraps these days. The newly married couple will be guaranteed privacy to start their new life together, and the bride will not be constantly hounded by the press, derided for her dress sense, criticised for putting on weight/losing weight/changing her hair and all the other things Diana and her ilk have had to put up with.

And hopefully, she won't end up being pursued by paps and driven to her death in a Parisian tunnel.