I can’t really remember the last time I went to a wedding. Well, I can, because it was yesterday, but I can’t reliably remember the time before that. I’ve been to a generous handful of weddings in my time – a few of them have been good, a few have been ok and the rest have been, er, a bit shit. A wedding day is supposed to be the happiest day of someone’s life and yet the chances of it going completely to plan are highly remote and, conversely, the chances of all sorts of things, planned or otherwise, coming along to fuck it all up are laughably high. Of course, it’s bound to be that way. The very worst weddings are remarkable displays of stupidity; of brazen ego, misdirected opulence and bad taste, narcissism and desperation, cold buffets and hot air. It doesn’t matter how golden a couple two people are meant to be, there will always be disagreements, resentment, and abundant, pointless frivolity (aka vast amounts of waste, in every sense imaginable).
As I reach the point in life where I can sniff the whiff of 50 coming round the corner, I have made my peace with the notion that sooner or later I’ll be invited to funerals a lot more often than I will weddings. They say that being invited to a lot of weddings is a sign of popularity but then so, I suppose, is being invited to a lot of funerals. I’m perhaps taking things for granted when I assume that I’ll probably be invited to my own funeral, because few and far between have been the weddings where my name has been first on the envelope. But that’s fine, because the worst weddings can often be far worse than an average funeral. But whichever you prefer you still get the same meat and potatoes: the same generic music choices, the same pretentious readings that you think no-one else will have thought of but come straight from the bumper book of the bleeding obvious, the same sad selection of nibbles, the same cheap fizzy and warm white wine and some hired gang of a waiting service, most of whom have just turned 19 and clearly don’t know the difference between a rice ball and a urinal cake. Whatever you hope for from a wedding is exactly what you won’t get, that’s the rub, they are only predictable in the sense that they won’t be as good as anyone thinks they might be, even if it all goes well.
Yesterday’s affair was a chance (not that I was particularly itching for one) to get back on the M40 for the first time in a while and head towards Oxford. What started out with crystal clear blue skies (and a thermometer reading low enough to make my genitals retract with a jolt – they eventually settled down somewhere around the lower half of my ribcage) soon turned dramatically, as if Charles Dickens himself was directing, into a thick, unshifting fog that stuck around well into the afternoon. There is a reason that most weddings don’t take place in the middle of winter and getting up at 7am to drive into a freezing, mystical cloud is just one of them, but sometime, if you like someone enough to even consider going to their hastily arranged nuptials, you just turn up your collar, strap on your spurs and mount up – surely it can’t be as bad as some of the others? Fortunately, a big fat dose of freezing fog lends Oxford an extra sense of drama, an extra flutter of authenticity and Victorian intrigue, a bit of added value atmosphere (which is comforting when it’s so cold you can’t sense your teeth anymore).
This wedding had the feeling of two people coming together while they still had the chance. Both safely into their middle age, with a couple of kids heading towards adulthood, recurring ill health had no doubt inspired them to make less dishonest people of each other. A small little gathering in the cosy environs of the Brasenose College chapel is not the sort of thing that one should turn a snout up at, and of course Brasenose has some pedigree: Robert Runcie, Douglas Haig, Williams Golding and Webb Ellis, John Buchan and Michael Palin, as well as some less fondly remembered oiks from history such as David Cameron, who must have attended Brasenose around the same time he was swishing about at the Bullingdon Club, allegedly stuffing his little fella in some poor trotter’s gob for bad measure. It’s a nice college with a nice chapel, and a fine venue for a wedding, if you’re after that kind of wedding at that kind of venue. It even has a medieval kitchen, which is, and indeed was, used for receptions, though recent renovations have rendered it looking about as medieval as something you’d find on page 17 of a Wickes catalogue.
God was very much present yesterday, in His usual, half-arsed kind of manner. It was God, for instance, that insisted I remove my warm, fluffy hat when I shuffled into the chapel. I’m told it’s required as a mark of respect, but on a day like yesterday I was more concerned that my skull might get frostbite. Fortunately, this was a well endowed Oxford college and not a local Methodist church so someone had turned the heaters on; they just didn’t tell my feet until the last line of The Lord’s Prayer. God was there, speaking through the Chaplain’s introduction and through a very poorly co-ordinated rendition of “Come to a Wedding”. God was there in the letter to the Philippians and in another rendition of that story where Jesus gets thirsty and turns the water into plonk. And God was there for the vows and the rings and the blessings and even to “Give me joy in my heart”, and as I sang with all the joy that my heart could muster I looked up and noticed the ceiling just above the organ could have done with a lick of paint. And then I looked down and saw that the prayer cushions could have done with some love. But then I thought God has surely got enough on his plate – and that we should all be grateful he bothered to turn up in the first place.
The reception was really too many people and not really enough food, in a medieval kitchen that didn’t leave much of any room left to swing a leftover avocado and smoked salmon blini. But there I mingled in some form of happiness, glad to be in good company and glad to have seen two good people tie the knot in a fashion that suited them just fine; or at least I hope it did. At the ceremony the chapel was treated to yet another rendition of “The art of marriage” by Wilferd A. Peterson, an overly sincere and rather preachy poem that does for a wedding what Auden’s “Funeral Blues” does for a, well, funeral. As guidance it might lay it on a bit thick, but then weddings in general are an exercise in doing just that, laying it on thick, for all to see – small or big, short or long, early or late – every wedding is just an opportunity to show off, though sometimes it’s not entirely clear what exactly it is that’s being shown off or why. But who cares? Despite the winter chill and the cold canapes there was warmth at work in Oxford yesterday, not to mention a sprinkle of humour and a dash of hope, and when the fog lifted a few miles out, biting away at the miles towards home, I felt glad I had gone and glad that this wedding had happened. It might not have been the best I’ve ever been to, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. Bloody good luck to ’em – no doubt they’re not perfect, but everyone deserves a bit of luck once in a while.
G B Burton. 12.01.2025
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 