2002.
Due to the emergence of a worrying pattern, my reluctance to attend weddings might be construed as a sincere desire not to jinx the cherished dream of the betrothed. I witness the nuptials, and their plan to landscape a Watford garden founders.
A stage-managed fall down the stairs occasioning a ‘light concussion’, and coming round with Foreign Accent Syndrome, did not work.
‘Who am I?’
‘You’re still going.’
‘I want you there,’ my friend, the bride-to-be, insisted.
‘If you invite me, it won’t last.’
She laughed.
She was marrying, for the first time, in her early forties. As a single woman, she appeared to be radiantly happy, and I gently cautioned her against ‘interfering with the formula’.
‘You’ve got a nice flat. A nice little car. Freedom to come and go as you wish. No picking up someone’s discarded underpants,’ I said, trotting off the positives.
She looked uncertain. I gestured towards her living room.
‘Lovely and compact. An open plan kitchen. Your own serving hatch. A nice little terrace where you can sip coffee and take the morning sun.’
Silence ensued.
‘Will it be a sit-down meal?’ I asked, for no especial reason.
‘Barbecue.’
I visualized her stationed behind a spitting grill, hair reeking of charcoal and onions, doling out chipolatas to a queue of eighty. Very ‘Princess for the Day’. She must have read my expression because she added, ‘Caterers, of course.’
‘Of course.’
The wedding was retro Americana-themed.
It was rather prophetic.
An unseemly argument broke out among several guests at the self-service buffet table, causing a substantial din. Someone contrived to break their foot. Later, his family all sat down on the dancefloor to ‘row the boat home’ to The Gap Band’s ‘Oops Upside Your Head’.
I looked over at her. Her face was a study in undiluted horror.
She had invited her friend, Vince, a semi-professional figure skater with an ear piercing that had turned septic.
‘You’ll get on like a house on fire,’ she said, with unshakeable certainty.
Immediately, I was committed to its failure. Vince was everything that I expected: wildly overfamiliar and effervescent.
In contrast, I grew increasingly tightly coiled and taciturn—exhibiting all the charm of a pterodactyl that had collided with a wind turbine.
‘Shall we get up and have a dance?’ he suggested, enviably ignorant of world affairs.
‘Dance? You mean to music?’
When the tinkling piano of Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ filled the air he rose from the table and, as if switching to autopilot, strode towards the middle of the dancefloor with the unstoppability of Terminator 2.
I have visited discotheques on four continents, and I can reliably inform you that if there is a Dorothy Squires fan club moderator on the premises when this song plays, he will machete his way to a podium, leaving maimed partygoers with life-changing injuries in his wake.
This is my opportunity to escape, I whispered to myself. Then, my friend, the bride, appeared, hovering over me.
‘Everything alright?’
‘Lovely!’ I replied.
‘Had enough to eat?’
‘Oh yes, lovely spread!’ I said, sounding like an aunt with a Memories of Caernarvon set of tea towels.
‘Vince is funny, isn’t he?’
‘Hilarious!’
‘Oh good, I knew you’d both get on.’ She was called away.
The bride and groom parted after eighteen months.
I was never convinced that they were well-suited: she grimaced at his jokes. Not a good portent; sometimes, humour is all we have. But, then, some of the most enduring partnerships are between people who can’t stand each other.
My thought is that riding a horse down the nave of a church to a Soft rock symphony, wearing an acre of taffeta, is no guarantee that you’ll survive your first self-assembly wardrobe together.
In point of fact, empty tummies and the hyena-like snappiness produced on assembling flatpack furniture figures not far behind infidelity as the reason for separations.
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