Category: Wedding

In the previous episode, we left our hero standing at the Registrar’s table, his bride beside him. Now read on…

Thankfully, none of the assembled folks decided to object when the Registrar asked if anyone knew of any just cause or impediment why Jules and I shouldn’t be married, and so we scooted through the vows and onto the signing of the Register. My handwriting may be increasingly unreadable, but as I signed my name and she signed hers, I thought of the words of Papa Lazarou: “You’re my wife now…”

And indeed she was. Papers were signed, and pictures were taken, and I kissed the bride and – to the strains of Gimme Some Lovin’, we exited the Regency Room as husband and wife. Pretty much out of sight of the guests, we giddily yelled ‘wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!’ and half-ran down the corridor like the overgrown infants we are.

At many weddings, the photographer calls the shots at this stage, ordering ‘female members of the groom’s family’ to stand with the happy couple, or sending a cousin to retrieve Auntie Susan from the toilet because she’s needed for a picture, but I have to report that the waywardness of all our guests meant our photographer had to give up on any kind of order to the pictures, and do what he could with those who were present. A comparison with herding cats would have been fair, so he had our blessing to go all free-form improv jazz with the sequence of his photos.

The Wedding Breakfast was held at 5pm, which must have been the latest breakfast I’ve ever had (and don’t forget that I was a student for a number of years), but due to the laydee’s clever planning and organization as regards both the table decorations and the seating arrangements, I heard a number of ahhhs as we entered, and a lot of ha ha has during the meal itself.

After the meal – much of which was locally-sourced and I suspect tasted all the better for it – came, of course, the speeches. The father of the bride wasn’t keen to do a speech, and since the day was about having a laugh rather than slavishly following tradition, we let him off, leaving it to myself and my Best Man to do the talking. Both Danny and I have some previous form when it comes to standing in front of people and talking, but I think it’s fair to say that we both felt a bit of pressure to come up with the goods.

Speaking for myself, I was pretty happy with the way my speech went – I managed to elicit tears from a few members of the gathered, and laughter from others, and thankfully at the appropriate stages in the speech; most importantly I managed to make it painfully obvious to everyone there – including my lovely now-wife – just how deliriously happy I was about marrying Jules, so the key point of my speech seemed to hit home.

Danny’s speech was top-notch, to my mind – honest about how we met and why we get along, and even when he referred to my feelings for Geri ‘Ginger Spice’ Halliwell, my bride didn’t flee in horror but instead stayed and laughed along with everyone else. It was just the sort of speech I hoped he’d make, and I was pleased it went over so well. If you’re reading this, Dan, many thanks – I knew you were the man for the job!

To be concluded…

So then, last Saturday (16th August), I got married. It was a day my now-wife Jules and I had been planning for over a year, and I’m pleased to report it went well, but of course, as one who uses seventy words when ten will do, I can’t leave it at that. So this is the first of three posts about the day – what I laughingly call ‘normal’ service will be resumed next week, but please indulge me as I regale / bore you with tales of the wedding; posts will be less blatantly self-absorbed soon, I promise.

First things first – we got married at Burton Court in Herefordshire. As you can see if you browse their website, Burton Court is a building with a history, and this is abundantly clear from the stuffed animals and archaeological treasures which litter the house, as well as – of course – its architecture and grounds. Many guests said to me how beautiful and / or interesting they thought the venue was, and I can only praise the tireless assistance of Edward Simpson, Burton Court’s Functions Co-Ordinator, who was friendly and accommodating, and without whom the day wouldn’t have been half the fun it was. If you’re looking for a venue for a wedding (or other event), you could do far worse than consider Burton Court.

Anyway, the civil ceremony was set for 3pm, and my Best Man Danny and I arrived at about 1.30pm. I chatted to him and the ushers a bit, and we finalised some details, until he eventually, and quite rightly, told me to stop faffing about and to go and get changed.

I’d decided that if there was one day in my life which merited lashing out on a made-to-measure suit, then surely it was my wedding day, and so my suit was made for me by Richard Thompson of Exclusive Tailoring (and indeed a testimonial by me appears on this page ). I wanted a suit which looked something like the one on the cover of this book, and Richard did a bang-up job taking this idea and making something which would fit me, and given my hair’s tendency to go wavy, not to look too much like The Eighth Doctor (though many might say that would have been a hell of an improvement).

Anyway, I donned my wedding outfit and went to mingle a bit before the wedding ceremony; in theory, this is the time when a groom’s supposed to get all nervous and unsure and wonder if the bride might not show up, but in all honesty I had no doubts at all about wanting to marry Jules, and she had made it pretty clear that she was intending to show up, so I used the time to swan around like the man of the hour (which I guess I kind of was) and to say hi to the folks who’d been kind enough to come – many of them from places quite a long way from Herefordshire.

The time came, though, for us to enter the Regency Room of Burton Court, where the ceremony was taking place, and after a brief chat with the Registrar, we sat down and waited for the Bride, accompanied by her father, to come in.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Stuart, who’s been married for some years, told me that turning round and seeing your bride come into the room is one of those moments in your life you never forget. When I heard the music and looked and saw her, I knew what he meant – in that real and biting and actual way that you know something, which is very different in practice than in some abstract theoretical way. It was a terrifically exciting moment, one which made my stomach free-fall in the best possible way, and Stu’s right, it’s something that I won’t forget as long as I live.

So she made her way to the front of the room, and the ceremony started, and instead of even the vaguest flicker of doubt, I had an overwhelming feeling of certainty, that I was doing the right thing, that I was marrying the right person, and as I looked at her and she smiled, I thought of the line from the Steve Martin film Roxanne (itself an update of my favourite play ever, Cyrano de Bergerac):

“This is my whole life right now. Standing here talking to you like this.”

To be continued…

As long-time readers will be aware, I’m getting married later this month.

If sitcoms and films are to believed, the groom’s an almost unwilling participant in the whole business – no doubt I’ve been guiled into proposing by some crafty female shenanigans, and am almost a non-participant in the preparations, reduced to little more than a bit-part dupe who just says “whatever you want, dear”, writes cheques as required, and shows up on the day.

For my part, I prefer to think I’ve met a remarkable woman who I want to spend the rest of my life with, and that we’ve worked well together to plan a day which will be both a legal ceremony and a party with music and cake and booze, but it’s very much a personal thing, I guess; a lot of grooms don’t want to get involved in the specifics of table decorations and the like, and some people see the wedding as being pretty much ‘the bride’s day’, so I can see why the groom might be somewhat sidelined.

Anyway, I wanted to share the one thing which has, as the day draws nigh, been the big and over-riding lesson I’ve learned about arranging a wedding, and which, if possible, I’d try to impress upon people in a similar situation. I don’t think it’s necessarily a new insight, but wanted to share it, just in case.

Okay, here we go. You ready? Drum roll…

If you can, tell both sets of parents to bugger off.

Obviously, I don’t expect you to actually use those words, but from what I’ve seen over the years, parental involvement in weddings is a major issue. It’s partly to do with generation gaps and the like, but the main problem which often happens is that there’s a complicated interference by well-meaning parents, an interference that’s often armed with the twin swords of financial control and (this is the more potent and emotionally-charged one) a delayed attempt to make amends for deficiencies in their own wedding.

In many cases, parents (often the bride’s parents, though no necessarily) pay for the wedding. And in many of these cases, the parents want to ‘be involved with the wedding’ as a result – or, as the happy couple are more prone to see it, they want to interfere, and invite relatives and friends of their own. And this latter point is the stickier one, because when Mum and Dad are paying, there’s always the implied leverage (or sometimes not so implied) that since they’re paying for it, well, it’s only reasonable. I seem to recall a terrific exchange on this subject in an episode of All Quiet On The Preston Front, which went roughly as follows:

Mother: Don’t forget, we are paying for this wedding.

Bride-To-Be: I know Mum, but you’re not buying it off me.

I think that’s very true; a lot of parents, with all the best intentions, think that by stumping up the money, they get to be very involved indeed, right down to drawing up a list of ‘suitable attendees’. I know that this was the case with my parents’ wedding and many others of their generation, and the problem is, this seems to create a residual feeling that their wedding day wasn’t quite as they would have wanted, and this niggling feeling takes root in the back of their mind until, a generation later, they start trying to live out their unfulfilled day by inviting Great-Aunt Shirley to their child’s wedding, despite the fact that the kid has no idea at all who this person is. And so the cycle begins again.

I’m simplifying, sure, but having told both sets of parents that we’ll pay for the wedding, and that as a result they get no input whatsoever into who’s invited (and indeed, if they don’t behave themselves, that they may not be invited either), m’lady and I have sailed through the whole process with a tiny fraction of the hassle I’ve seen amongst others in a similar situation. Actually looking at the guest list for the day and knowing that every single person attending is going to be there because we want them there is, surely, much better than (to give a real example from my experience of spectating on such things) being forced to invite someone who was the bride’s mother’s neighbour when she was growing up, but who the bride hasn’t seen in a couple of decades… and all because of the implied leverage of the parents paying for the event.

It’s not always possible on financial grounds to pay for your own wedding, I know, but if you’re thinking about getting wedded and either or both sets of parents offer to pay a large chunk of it (that is, what business folks might call a controlling interest), if you agree to take their money, I strongly, emphatically, urge that you accept only on condition that they don’t think it gives them any kind of right to influence or control the day. This sounds a bit cold, I know, but my experience is that it makes this so, SO much easier.

If the above tip isn’t relevant to your wedding arrangements, though, then my other, hot off the press tip is that you do not engage the firm ‘Wrapit’ to arrange your wedding list* . A tip which, I think, applies across the board, to weddings guests and happy couples alike.

*We actually thought about using them, but didn’t really care for the rather perstersome way they kept phoning and telling us to come in for a consultation session. Thank Buddha their poor customer service approach made us go elsewhere – though it does help explain how the company didn’t manage to make any profit at all in six years.