On Weddings...

I have never been a wedding kind of person. I grew up with the firm belief that marriage was a way for blokes to get a very cheap housekeeper and nanny (for them, not the children) and was determined from a young age that fate would hold more for me than that. Clearly I was not a romantic child: no dream of a knight in shining armour for me. (It came as something of a disappointment to discover that ‘living in sin’ - as The Mother calls it - is not the radical anti-marriage stance I youthfully envisaged but entails broadly the same domestic arrangements for most people.) And then I met the man who persuaded me to actually marry him, and I have to confess that our wedding day was a hoot. Since then I have been hooked. I am the perfect wedding guest: I cry at the ceremony, I can bore the pants off strangers at my table, I laugh like a drain at the Best Man’s jokes and dance like a deranged child at the crappy 70’s disco. I can even be persuaded, with enough champagne, to have a blazing row with the groom’s sexist mates and be sick in the toilet. I think my superior talents as a wedding guest must be well known, as this weekend I am going to the wedding of someone whom I have met only twice before. The fact that I will not know a single soul should, I think, give me permission to make an even bigger fool of myself than usual. I really can’t wait.