WEDDING BELL BLUES

Seven years ago, almost to this very day, my wife and I attended a wedding in Essex. I had hired a car, a Seat Leon, and we left Haddington at 06:15. I drove 445 miles and ended up in a Travelodge in Braintree, at £42.50 for a double room for the night. The journey had taken ten hours. The hotel room was suffocatingly hot, and the window wouldn’t open, so I took my wife to the nearby MacDonalds, to eat fat-ingested ersatz meat in a bread roll. A Rover 400 nearby caught fire, giving off loads of noxious fumes, much the same as the burger I was attempting to eat. Later, the Rover was towed away by the AA, with the owners, a man and a woman in their thirties, looking bemused. The sky was clear and full of optimistically twinkling stars. There was a crescent moon. I looked forward to the nuptials on the morrow. The morning dawned bright and clear. I threw 12p into a wishing-well and wished the happy couple 12p’s worth of good luck. The wedding was in the keep of all that was left of an ancient castle. We sat in the stygian gloom of the main hall, where the wedding was to take place, and awaited the forty other guests, not one of whom I knew. The ceremony went off well, in the modern idiom, with the bride and groom seated on chairs and making inane secular promises such as promising to laugh at an appropriate time. The bride broke down in tears when delivering her peroration, and other ladies, many in extraordinary hats, dabbed at their eyes in sympathy. One woman wore a pork-pie hat with what looked like the tail-feathers of an archaeopteryx trailing behind. I tried hard not to laugh. We hung around both inside and outside for a long time, waiting for the photographer to finish taking his 600 or so photographs, several of which were of us. We drove 40 miles to the reception and dined on beef, which tasted rather nice. We shared the table with several cousins of the groom and a bearded chap from Warrington who collected miners’ helmets. We fled the scene relatively early and drove another 40 miles before fetching up in a motel in Basildon, in which the room was even darker than the Wedding Hall, mainly because an elm tree planted right outside the window blocked out every pixel of light. The ceaseless roar of the traffic along the A127 was like a file working on the nervous system. Breakfast the next day was a do-it-yourself affair, the only served item being a fry-up which, to my chagrin, contained a hill of lukewarm baked beans. When I paid the £47.95 for the room and breakfast, the French boy on the counter joked – “Zis teel, eet ‘as not woken up yet,” in response to my mutterings about the length of time it took to accept my credit card. We drove home, taking the rest of the day to arrive back in East Lothian. The reason I mention all of this is, save for a family affair a couple of years ago, I haven’t been invited to a wedding since.