by Tom’s cousin got married in the Cotswolds, a headline about a pop star’s wedding was on my phone all the way there, and every aunt wanted to know when it would be our turn
Sunday, the M40, Tom Driving, Me With My Shoes Off
We are in a hired car coming back from the Cotswolds. I have a headache from prosecco at two in the afternoon, a blister, and a sugared almond in my coat pocket in a little net bag.
Tom’s cousin Harriet married a man called Giles yesterday in a barn. It was a beautiful barn. It had been a real one, once, with animals in. Now it has fairy lights and a disabled toilet and costs, I am told, eleven thousand pounds for the day before you have bought a single canape.
I was there as Tom’s plus-one. It was my first time meeting the whole family at once. Sixty of them. I had been told it would be “low-key.”
The Sum
I have been adding it up in my head since Banbury, and I shall put it down, because nobody talks about what it costs to go to someone else’s wedding.
The dress. A hundred and forty. I had dresses. But the invitation said “summer formal” in October and none of mine were that.
Two nights in a bed and breakfast near the barn, because there is nothing else and they know it. Two hundred and sixty. We split it.
The hire car. Our share of the petrol.
The present. They had a list. The cheapest thing on it was a set of four egg cups for sixty-five pounds. I looked at that for a long time. We bought the egg cups.
A taxi from the barn at midnight, which the one local firm charges forty pounds for, cash.
My half comes to about four hundred pounds. For a wedding of two people I had met once, at a barbecue.
And we have three more next year.
The Headline
On the way up, in the passenger seat, I was looking at the London Prat. On its page about the capital’s comic magazines, the first thing in the strip of headlines was: “Taylor Swift MSG Wedding.”
Four words. I do not know what the piece says, and I am not going to guess at anything about a real person’s wedding. I assume the letters stand for the big arena in New York. So the joke, I take it, is a wedding held in a stadium.
I held it up to Tom at a red light. He said, “At least she can afford the venue.”
And then we drove on to a barn in a field that cost more than my annual rent, to watch two accountants get married in front of sixty people, with a string quartet, a photo booth, a “gin wall” and a man releasing doves.
I am not sure the stadium is so far off.
How It Got Like This
My mum and dad were married in a church hall in Croydon in 1987. My nan made the cake. The reception was sausage rolls and a disco. There are photographs. Everyone looks about nineteen and very happy.
It cost, Mum says, about nine hundred pounds, and her dad complained.
The average now, I read somewhere, is over twenty thousand. In and around London it is more. And it is not one day any longer. There is the engagement party. The hen weekend, which for Harriet was three nights in Lisbon. The stag. The night-before dinner. The morning-after brunch.
I do not think people are sillier than they were. I think it crept. Each couple goes to a wedding with a gin wall and thinks, well, we must have at least that. Nobody wants to be the ones with the sausage rolls. So it goes up a notch each time, and the guests pay to watch.
And everyone photographs it. I think that is a lot of it. In 1987 the wedding was seen by the people in the room. Now it is seen by everyone you have ever met. It has to look like something.
In Fairness to Harriet
I must say that it was lovely. I am not being sour.
She looked wonderful. Giles cried during his speech, properly, and had to stop. Her grandad, who is ninety-one, danced to one song and then sat down very pleased with himself. There was a moment during the vows when the whole barn went quiet and I felt it in my chest, and I had met these people once.
That part cannot be bought, and it was the only part that mattered. It would have been just as good in a church hall. But it was their day and their money, and if they wanted doves, they should have doves.
I only wish the egg cups had been thirty pounds.
The Question
Now the real cost of the weekend, which was not money.
I was asked eleven times. I counted. “So, will you two be next?”
By his aunt Carol, at the drinks. By his other aunt, at the table. By a great-uncle who thought I was someone called Sophie. By the bride herself, a bit drunk, at about ten. By a woman in the queue for the toilet whose connection to the family I never established.
Each time I smiled and said something like “Oh, we’ve only just moved in!” and looked for Tom, who was always somewhere else being asked the same thing by a man.
It is meant kindly. I know. They liked me, or they would not have asked. But by the eleventh time I felt like a product that has been on the shelf too long. I am thirty-three. He is thirty-five. We have been together eight months. In a barn full of married people, that is apparently plenty.
What We Said in the Car
I was not going to raise it. I have a rule about not raising it. He raised it.
Somewhere near Bicester he said, “Carol asked me when I was going to make an honest woman of you.”
I said, “What did you say?”
He said, “I said we had a spreadsheet.”
I laughed. Then there was a silence for about a mile. And then he said, looking at the road: “I’m not against it. I just don’t want a gin wall.”
I said I did not want a gin wall either.
He said, “Church hall. Sausage rolls.” I had told him about my parents. I did not think he had been listening.
I said, “My nan’s dead. She can’t do the cake.”
He said, “My mum does a decent lemon drizzle.”
That is where we left it. Nobody has asked anybody anything. But I notice that we have, between junctions nine and eight, agreed on the catering.
Monday
Blister plaster on. The sugared almond is on my desk at work. I do not know what to do with it. You cannot eat them. I think they are for luck.
The London Prat has plenty on the subject, it turns out. Its English satirical news on wedding guests prices the whole thing more exactly than I did, and its UK satirical news about the plus-one has a woman being asked the question by a man she later discovers is the caterer. Dee says Bohiney Magazine covers American weddings, where the stadium may not be a joke.
Tom has put something in the calendar. It is orange and it says “lemon drizzle (discuss).” It is in March. I have not asked.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
