wendy house

they’re so young, and

there’re so many guests :-

they’re as good as Indian

It’s the sort of comment that prompts me to produce furniture rattling laughter. And so it did. The Indian lady liked my refined audience skills. Turning to me she started a more detailed comparision between this Church of England wedding and the Indian family weddings she’d attended. Her husband nodded, smiled and giggled.

This happy couple helped distract me from the disturbing lack of hats. Over 200 guests and only 4 hats. If you count a fascinator as a hat then maybe 14 hats.  A generally poor show for headgear. Adrienne‘s business must feel the pain of this changing trend.

What an amazing setting for a wedding ceremony and celebration. All in one, with pony rides, petting farm, tug of war along  the isle of trees that, earlier, the bride walked down. Bonfire and fireworks in the evening. It was a truely fairytale event without rain and with many stylish guests.

I wasn’t the only person in a kilt at the wedding. This father and son couple were wearing their official kilts. The father, a military instructor at Sandhurst, said of his son:

He hasn’t fully got the hang of it yet, he wouldn’t be able to step over a barbedwire fence and I have to make him wear underwear

Later, the boy’s kilt was on back to front – it must have worked it’s way around – but he didn’t notice. Very cute.

You can just see the ‘sgian dhub‘, Gaelic for “black knife,”  an ornamental sock knife poking out of the top of the fathers sock. It’s a polite gesture to your host to put it in the sock where it can be seen – rather than hidden to enable a suprise attack

He told a delightful story of how the bagpipe’s were banned as an ‘instrument of war’ because they instilled fear in the opposition. Alas, I could find no evidence to support this claim online. This is what wikipedia says:

King George II attempted to assimilate the Highlands into Great Britain by weakening Gaelic culture and the Scottish clan system,though claims that the Act of Proscription 1746 banned the Highland bagpipes are not substantiated by the text itself. It was soon realised that Highlanders made excellent troops and a number of regiments were raised from the Highlands over the second half of the eighteenth century.

Since returning to the UK in 2007 I’ve been to 5 weddings

Lots!

The BBC noted last year how the marriage rate in the UK population is steadily falling as a proportion of the population to its lowest rate for 100 years

Amongst my friends there was a spate of weddings in our mid 20′s.  People seemed to get a degree where they met their beloved. They graduated and lived together while they both worked to save for a deposit on a home and pay for a wedding, then got married and had kiddies

A significant proportion of my friends long-term cohabit without getting married. They have stable loving relationships, mostly with kiddies. Marriage just isn’t part of the way they announce their love and commtiment. Few are happily single like Tiger, Spotty dog and me

The weddings I’m going to now are mainly in people in their 30s for thier first marriage. Occassionally its a precursor to having kiddies. More often its just that it took that long to know the right person. There are some changes in the format of the weddings. Some of the things I’ve noticed are:

• Fewer women wear hats – not everyone
• Someone other than the father gives the bride away – an artefact of the age of people marrying, a father is no longer available
• Couples write their own vows
• The bride makes a speech during the speeches
• the photography is less formal, though it may include a few ‘almost’ formal photographs where the bride/grooms family stand around the married couple
• Entertainment is laid on for the reception – it’s not just a wedding breakfast

Today’s 20 somethings may not experience the same ‘marriage’ cycles that I have because they have to deal with

• high unemployment
• high rental and mortgage costs – encouraging them to stay with their parents or share houses
• high student debt levels
• difficulty getting a mortgage even when both people have good jobs

In this context I suspect marriages will decline further, happen later in life and change nature from the sumptuous parties to more cost-effective events…

Mumsie helped with my wedding outfit decisions. What goes with my fabulous new Royal Stewart tartan kilt:

• Sox or stockings? Stockings – Mumsie didn’t think it was good form to reveal my bare knees to strangers. I take after Dad in the knee department, he once won a nobbly-knees contest
• Red or Black stockings? Black stockings – Mumsie felt it would be ok to wear black to a wedding nowadays. The colour is no longer reserved for mourning.  Several wedding guests were dressed completely in black. Tiger, who was actually in mourning wore a black shirt. One guest wore a white lace dress, risking a clash with the Bride’s outfit
• Red or Black shoes? Red shoes – Celebratory flatties for lots of jigging on the post-vows disco dancefloor
• White or Black shirt? White shirt
  
• Leather or velvet jacket? Leather jacket
  
• Hat or no hat – No hat!!!!!!  No-one at the wedding wore a hat.  4 women were sporting fascinators at the ceremony, but no hats or tiarras. A trend that’s changed dramatically in my wedding-going career

asked the young girl

Because they’re pretty and tell the tale of their owners running around – free from footwear

I was the only girl over the age of 10yrs wearing flat-soled shoes. The youngsters were quite keen to kick-off their flatties, I liked their attitude, they were all about running, twirling and laughing.

The adults were more about drinking, smoking and re-telling histories

At Pendennis castle, a wedding party finished their breakfast then photographic sessions in time for the bride to be whisked away by the whirling winds of passion and tears of happiness mixed with the rain.   Beautiful.   A groom tackling a kilt would have added a cherry to my experiential cake.

Quaker weddings.   Highly recommended.

The couple marry each other.  No third party symbolic proxy as a represenative  of a god.   No-one gives the bride away.   The couple make a public commitment to each other in a way that suits their own personal relationship with their god.   Everyone shares meditative silence, interspersed with thoughts, poems  and music as the spirit provides,  followed by tea and cake.      Then  all the guests sign a wedding certificate for the couple to keep.

There is a fabulous peacefulness, equality and equanimity about the occassion.

 The couple used a classic VW camper van to take them from the ceremony to the field that hosted the reception.   The same camper van  provided the bride and groom with a place to spend their wedding  night.

In the reception field,   a marquee tent hosted a blue grass band,   bands with brass sections, inflatable chairs,   and oodles of wedding guests.   The field also hosted the guests tents,   fireworks, fire and pathways of candles carved through the grass.  During the fireworks I snuck off to keep warm by a fire where I was leant a  much needed  pair of long,   black, thermal leg warmers.   All around excellentness.

For all your wedding-guest transportation from church to reception veunue needs.    A red London bus wedding special.   As you can imagine,   this was the highlight of the wedding for me.

The reception venue in a cricket pavilion, while a match was in progress,  was also so wonderfully English that soppiness abounded.

<soppiness warning>

Just a few of the too numerous to enumerate highlights:

• Gift registry:   www.epilepsy.org.uk  & www.simoncommunity.org.uk
• The bride wasn’t ‘given away’ like chattles,   bride and groom walked down the isle together.
• Isle-walk accompanying  music:   You only live twice
• Readings including multiple references to Pooh in A.A.Milne’s  ‘us two’   (read by AfH)
• Outstanding vows because they acknowledged each others strenghts and weaknesses and showed love, respect, knowledge of what it takes to make a relationship work and be  fun too.   I particularly liked this one:

I promise to allow myself to be silly around you and to enjoy you being silly around me as well.

• 7 Henchman subtly and actively coordinating the smooth running of the  event: Oddjob, Mr. Wint, Mr. Kidd, Nick Nack, May Day, Xenia Onatopp, Jaws
• Red wedding dress
• No ‘maids’
• A photobased childrens TV themed Quiz organized by table at the wedding breakfast.
• Bride’s speech toplining the other speeches.
• Creatively quirky photographer:   http://www.vikmartin.co.uk/
• Local bands at the reception were friends of the Bride and Groom,   some included the Bride or Groom and all played at least one cover version of Bond theme tune,   compared by AFH.
• My yellow-red shot silk  hat,    however, the relative lack of hats on other guests  was actually a tad disturbing.

Tables were decorated in childrens TV themes,  with models and soft toys, and each guest  as a character,   I was Soo.   As you can see, even  Bagpuss joined the fun.

<soppiness temporarily suspended>

first Man In Panama Hat (MIPH): that is the most striking womans hat at this wedding,   I didn’t recognise you earlier,  is it new?

Wendy:   I have a tan.   The hat’s about 20yrs old,  from Cornwall, it’s my favourite hat,  though I rarely have a special-enough occassion to wear it (subdues jumping impulse  based on the excitement of being in the company of 2 other people wearing hats).

first MIPH:  it did  SAY Cornwall to me (giggles).  

second MIPH: it is the ONLY woman’s hat at this wedding (giggles).

Headgearless guest:    Isn’t it  good of the Bride and  Groom to arrange a wedding so that  we can all wear our favourite clothes (smiles).

On this fabulously sunny and very cheerful day the female wedding guests were not ruining their immaculate coiffures by squishing them under hats.   Instead a rash of fascinators were jiggling with the movement of their wearers.