Weddings

 I’m conflicted.

I love a wedding. It’s the hope, the love, the expectation that it will last forever, the flowers, the outfits and the smiles. A wedding makes people happy and after the time we’ve all had we need a bit of happiness. It was very kind of the Prime Minister to marry his girlfriend and give us all a bit of happiness. Really. I mean it. I’m not being sarcastic. I do love a wedding.

At first, it was difficult to excited about it. Without pictures or descriptions of the dress and smiling happy guests it felt as though we had been cheated. 

Then came confusion. Who knew the Prime Minister was catholic? How can a divorced person be married by a Catholic priest? How can anyone have a secret wedding in a church? Do so few people attend church that the reading of the banns was completely missed? 

I didn’t like myself for all these thoughts. If a young woman wants to marry a scruffy man almost as old as her absent father, with questionable morals and a track record of faithlessness then who am I to spoil that? If we were going to have a wedding then why can’t we just be happy for them?

Then, finally, we got the picture of the dress.

I’m ashamed to say that my first thought was, “Oh, that woman has terrible taste!”

This might be true but it was mean of me and speaks of my age because 1970s inspired bo-ho weddings are all the rage.

The reason that women spend so much money on their wedding dress is because the picture should be timeless. Of course, there is no such thing because fashion dates. When I got married it was all big pouffy dresses and even bigger hair. The Seventies, however, were a fashion disaster. Wedding dresses were so awful that many women just quietly got married in a register office in brown flares and a jacket. Those who were married in the 1970s just hid their Wedding photos. Very few people looked good in that floaty unstructured garment. 

“What on earth possessed me to get married in that?” they cry, “I looked like I was wearing my nighty!”

“It was a very odd look. Very gothic ghost, but we all fell for it.”

The fashion of the Seventies was inspired by Edwardian dress sense, with its new freedom and looseness but that didn’t last long because of a war and virus killing off most of the men. I wonder if when my younger Aunts got married there were older women like me (although probably unmarried because of the war and stuff) looking at them and thinking about the fashion of their youth and how awful it was. Maybe those spinster aunts would have associated the looseness of the dress with its sleeves that dripped in your gravy to have caused the blight that fell on their generation. I’m not saying that loose lace sleeves and big floppy hats or huge flower crowns are necessarily bad but in my mind they lead to rigid tops, flouncy skirts and Cold War. In the the mind of the old unmarried aunts of the 1970s it lead to death, destruction, grief, illness and poverty. 

So, I am going to bite my tongue and not mention that the lace ladder down the front looks like a zip or point out that the Prime Minister could have at least bought a new tie. Instead, I’m going to hope that for this young woman the love she has now lasts forever. I’m going to hope that she will be able to look back on her photos in 30 years time and not be ashamed of her choices.