On horses and carriages.

You don’t even need to scratch the surface to find a load of bollocks about weddings on the internet. Christ knows how much time is spent trawling the cyber-aisles looking for advice and ideas and venues and do’s and don’t and endless ways of emptying your bank account just in the pursuit of the perfect wedding day. Just in case you’re in any doubt there is no such thing as the perfect wedding. You might think your day was or will be, but you’re kidding yourself. Something won’t quite go to plan and if that something is just one thing then you should think yourself very blessed indeed. In fact weddings are really just disasters waiting to happen and that most seem to come and go without a mushroom cloud billowing up into the atmosphere is because deep down there’s always a lot of love around to keep things balanced. I bet you never thought you’d hear me say that. But it’s true, love does smooth out a lot of wedding kinks. Weddings are a Venn diagram of love, money, hopes, nerves, fears, make-up, hair and high expectations. And never forget there will always be a few twats to slick the path with oil.

So, weddings are never perfect and they never will be. There are too many human beings involved and when they come together in volume all kinds of banana skins litter the first dance floor. It’s why nature doesn’t do marriage and weddings. Two wolves meet and fancy each other and have little wolves and live happily ever after until they die horribly at the hands of rifle enthusiasts from Quebec. But do they bother with a wedding and all that fuss? Of course not, because they know it’s not worth their while; they just get on with living instead of getting on with racking up £23,000 of credit card debt before they’ve even covered the honeymoon. To Quebec. And if a waterfall married a coral reef, well that would be fine too because it wouldn’t require matching suits from Moss Bros, daft orchids as centrepieces and a DJ playing ‘The Pina Colada Song’ as Uncle Roddy takes a slash against the side of the marquee. Preferably the outside. We had that song at our wedding but fortunately we don’t have an Uncle Roddy.

You may think I’m being cynical but actually quite the opposite is true. It’s the wedding industry that’s cynical: they promise to give you the most special day of your lives, it just might cost you and, oh, no they won’t be there on the day and they won’t step in when there’s a snag, just so you know. The only thing the wedding industry is definitely not interested in is how your wedding actually went. By the time the dust has settled they’ve upped shop and fucked off to the next punter.

Anyway, today is our 5th wedding anniversary, so yay us. The reason I know that weddings are never perfect is because though our wedding day was easily, by a country mile, my favourite day ever it was positively riddled with impurity and pratfall. Various family members (but no-one who’ll be reading this) were ever so slightly less than useless. Others were fantastic beyond measure – there you go, that’s how things balance out. ‘The wife’ had invited too many pointless people who I had never met and who since have thoroughly justified not being invited in the first place anyway. The venue waited until the last minute to tell us we couldn’t have quite the day we were expecting. I lost my voice. Hitler’s great grand-daughter turned up and a girly fight nearly started because of a disagreement about Jimmy Saville. And finally ‘the wife’ and I, along with our dear friends the Frottagepots were turfed out of our boutique B&B, on our wedding night, by a deranged, poisonous little fucking dwarf that made the one from ‘Don’t Look Now’ look like Lorraine Kelly.

Yet here we are, 5 years in and pretty fucking solid, thanks for asking. It doesn’t always end well for every wedding day (as above – our day really, really did not end too well; so we just had to cap it off in our own style), just as it doesn’t end well for every marriage. Neither of us really knows what may come……. I’ve stopped that sentence because I don’t want to spend the next gazillion years touching wood and avoiding walking under ladders. We’re doing more than fine and I’ve done very well for myself, and that’s more than fine enough for me. Bottom line is – you get married when you get married and that’s when you think it’s the right time and the right person for you, both of you. That’s when it usually works. Unless you’re idiots, in which case good luck. It will never be perfect because humans just aren’t perfect, but it can be your special version of perfect and that is more than enough to whittle away the years in wedded comfort. Perfection is a myth, a lie sold to you at a wedding fair in a soulless conference hall; living as close as you can get to your own version of perfection is the reality. I’m very happy with the reality. Happy anniversary, Mrs Wifey, lots more glorious imperfection to come. Imperfection mostly from me, I expect.

G B Hewitt. 01.08.2019