I'm just about to reply to a wedding invite. We're going. Not that we wouldn't. I can only think of one wedding invite I've ever turned down, and that was because it clashed with one I'd already to replied to.
This wedding will probably be about the 10,000 I've been to. I mean, I've literally been to dozense of weddings over the past 20 years, and have at least one a year, every year.
My first wedding was my dad's cousin Wendy's in Christchurch, 1973. I was eight. I don't remember much about it save for my dad getting me one blackcurrant cordial after another, meeting his other cousin Jeff for the first time, and there being a mynah bird behind the bar. Looking at the pictures now it's another world.
Then there was a 15-year-gap in which no relatives married and only my parents went to weddings. The next one for me involved a very lengthy trip up to the Isle of Man for a schoolfriend's wedding. She married young, to someone who was in the SAS.
It was great fun in the run-up, and the groom has a stag night on the eve of the wedding. Needless to say it was a bad idea, which involved variously, doing the Timewarp with a load of his squaddie mates, nightclub hopping and getting horribly plastered.
I don't know why we thought it was a good idea to push the groom down a riverbank without noticing the low chainlink fence halfway down, but it was brought home to us the next day that it wasn't when he went down the aisle on crutches. And it pissed down. Every time I hear Jane Weidlin's Rush Hour I think of the Isle of Man. I borrowed a tenner of the schoolfriend I went with and I've not seen him since.
So nothing for a year, then they started in earnest and we've never looked back. Since then I've been to so many weddings I've seriously lost count. Sometimes even two in one weekend. I remember borrowing a friend's car and going to Devon, then back early doors to London for another one. Never again.
We've done them all: young marriages, late marriages, cathedral, register office, Jewish, Greek, second marriages, high church, low church, stately home, old school, gay, shotgun weddings and ones that have taken years of military planning; marriages in Scotland, Ireland, USA, France, Canada; white dresses, black dresses, red dresses shorts and t-shirts, transsexuals causing a commotion, no one laughing at the best man's speech, family bust ups, one where everyone was convinced the bride wouldn't show (she escaped from his terrible clutches six months later), large crowds, family only, Las Vegas (they never last), the list is endless. I've never been to a fancy dress wedding. I hope I never have to.
It's a bit of a blur. I'd have to have a really good think to remember some of those weddings. Some of those people would be even more hard to recall.
Oh well, it's all good fun. I'm looking to this wedding. I like a nice wedding, don't you?
