What's a Wedstival?

“How do you make a marriage work?  Tell your wife that she looks pretty, even if she looks like a truck” – Ricky, Age 10

My beloved niece Emma and her boyfriend Cian announced some time ago that they were going to get married this summer, in a super cool wedding.  There would be a hand fastening ceremony, where a rope is wound around the joined hands of the couple, until they’re more or less lashed together, appropriately enough. His Nibs and I often look at each other in disbelief that we tied ourselves together in the legal sense.  I’d never seen anyone physically do so before.

Emma and Cian would go to the registry office a couple of days after the ceremony and have a civil ceremony, with witnesses only.

I was recently informed that weddings of this description are known as wedstivals –something between a wedding and a festival. 

His Nibs was very confused when the invitation arrived, because there would be no signing anything.  I think he felt a bit put out.  He’d had to put paper to pen at our wedding, I think he thought Cian was getting away with something.

“So are they hippies?”

“No.  Well, maybe they are.  I don’t know.  Does it matter?  You don’t have to wear a suit.”

 “It’s not a real wedding if there’s no registrar there.”

“They’re going to the registry office on the Tuesday, to get legally married, but they’re getting married on Saturday.”

“Love, they’re not.  They’re actually getting married on the Tuesday.”

“No, they’re getting married on the Saturday.  Why are we arguing about this?”

But argue he did.  On and on about whether this was a wedding or not.  Eventually I had to fight dirty.

 “Listen, do you remember when we got married?  What was more important to you, promising to love each other, or signing the register?  Which of those things makes you more married?”

His Nibs is not such an eejit that he would suggest to me that we are married only because we are contractually bound to it.

“The promises” – this was said in a sulky tone which told me that he knew he was beaten.

“Right.  So the important bit is on the Saturday.  You’re not allowed to wear your Crocs.”

I thrashed myself about a bit, confused about how to dress for a casual wedding. I knew Emma had a stunning wedding dress.  I didn’t want to turn up in jeans if everyone else was dressed up.  On the other hand, it was a fairly hippie affair.  I didn’t want to look uptight and prissy.  I was a fool to think about it so much.  Because this was the wedding where you could wear literally anything you wanted, and nobody would bat an eyelid. 

We took our seats in front of an arch with billowing fabric around it.  The wedding invitation had clearly stated that the ceremony would be at three.  When we got there we were informed that the other pair had gotten confused, and thought it was at half three.  When I say the other pair, I'm referring to Emma and Cian.  They'd forgotten the time of their own wedding.  We took our seats and waited.  Three o'clock came and went. So did half past three.  Apparently they were looking for their sunglasses, though this is unconfirmed.  Eventually, eight people came strolling up the garden, toward the arch, and took their places.  One girl in a gorgeous dress you could wear to a society wedding, Fiachra, the groom’s brother, in bare feet.  It was almost unbearably cool.  I was jealous of their youth and their nonchalant fabulousness. 

When the bride and groom came strolling along, holding hands, there was a standing ovation and some very excited cheering.  I liked that.  Why only clap after people get married?  It takes a lot of work to organise a wedding, brides and grooms deserve a cheer for even getting there. 

Next, each of the original eight stepped forward in turn and read a quote, I’ll give you an example; “I will love you forever, whatever happens, till I die and after I die..” and so on, then asked the happy couple to make a promise related to the quote, like to always love each other.

And of course, the poor innocent eejits, they promised.  When you’re there in your lovely dress and everyone is cheering you and there’s a party on for you, it’s easy to forget that you will feel no love for this person when they use up the last of the milk, or you step on a dirty underpants on the bedroom floor.  Or maybe that’s just us.

It was all so romantic that I was able to push away my thoughts of Emma and Cian turning to each other when the toilet seat is left up for the millionth time or there’s no money left, or they’re just irritating each other so much they can’t be in the same room, and wondering about the fact that they once chose to physically tie themselves together.

It was a lovely wedding.  I shed a tear, I might as well admit. When Emma’s three year old son handed the rings to his aunt he got the second standing ovation of the day.  When the groom kissed the bride we all became almost hysterical with joy.

A strange thing, the joy created by a newly married man kissing his bride. I would never usually cheer or clap at the sight of one of my nieces being soundly snogged.  But I was delighted for them.

After they were untied, (more cynical thoughts, along the lines of “if only it was that simple in real life” pushed away) there was a great celebration with barbecue and drink and music, and since this was happening in a private garden in the middle of the country, miles from the nearest hotel, camping.

The whole place was filled with bubbles and bunting and balloons and small children running around.  We all sat around in the sun chatting and taking pictures and drinking, and then we were directed to the house, where there was tasty salads and roast meats and crusty bread , and lovely  gourmet burgers on the barbecue outside.  It was a sumptuous feast, and absolutely perfect food for a crowd of people who would do little but drink for the rest of the day.

At some point, as the day stretched into evening, someone reminded Emma that we still hadn’t heard the speeches.  “Oh yeah.” She shrugged.  “I forgot about that.  Oh well.”  If they were any more laid back they'd be in a coma.

Eventually it got cold.  Cian lit firepits and garden candles, and the massive bunch of balloons in the middle of the garden had LED lights in each one and they glowed in the dark.  The place was filled with fairy lights, even the tents in the camping area were festooned.

You can only imagine my relief when I found out that Emma and Cian are so normal.  When instead of being little lovesick fairies in a land of bubbles and flowers, it turns out, that he’ll make a holy show of her without batting an eyelid.  In the run up to the wedding, he had become obsessed with the weather forecast.  So obsessed, in fact, that he knew the times of expected showers, to within ten minutes.  And he kept telling everyone he met these details.  Emma said he’d make a trainspotter look fascinating, going on about it.

His Nibs and I didn’t stay the night.  I’m unreasonable when it comes to tents.  I tend to wake up a lot during the night and moan that the ground is hard or I’m cold or that I’m not happy having only a sheet of thin fabric between me and potential predators.  Yes, even in Waterford.  I wake His Nibs every time, so he’s like a savage by morning.  Also, I knew he’d be very unreasonable about being woken up by other people’s singsongs in the middle of the night. 

But I was sorry to leave.  I felt that every aspect of the wedding had gone incredibly well. I could have done without the part where I fell in the only dip in the entire garden and bruised my knees and my pride and showed my industrial strength undies to the group, but sure what harm?

Yesterday, they had an appointment to go to the registry office and get legally married.  At some point, the mother of the bride asked when they were going to get ready, and what everyone was wearing.  There would be no getting ready, she was informed, they were going as they were.  As far as they were concerned they’d been married since Saturday and this was only form filling.  So they went as they were and got married in the eyes of the State.  And then they all went for burritos.

At no stage was I, nor will I ever be, as cool as them.  If that’s what a hippie is, I sorely wish I was one.

'Til Death Do Us Part

Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that’s a real treat.

-          Joanne Woodward.

His Nibs and I had our wedding anniversary yesterday.  Our anniversary is always a happy day in this house, because we both take the day off work every year.  His Nibs takes the day off because I ask him to, and I take it off so that we can spend the day together and go out for a nice lunch, and so I can hit him with random memory tests of our wedding day and drive him mad.

Yesterday was a beautiful day.  We went out for a nice lunch, and sat outside to eat.  I had pasta, he had a steak sandwich.  The food is irrelevant to the story, but if I was reading this for the first time, the only thing I’d be thinking for the rest of this story is “I wonder what they had for their lunch?”  Especially if I was hungry while reading it.

Anyway, all was going well, we were happy and relaxed until I hit him with “What’s your strongest memory of our wedding day?”

I could see the hunted look come into his eyes immediately.  I knew he was thinking too fast and would give the wrong answer.

“It started raining in the afternoon.  That was great, because we didn’t have to spend hours taking photographs.  So we got to spend the time with our friends in the bar.”

“That’s your strongest memory of our wedding day?  The weather?”

He was no longer hunted looking.  He sat back in his chair and smiled.

“I remember we nearly had a row in the car on the way to the hotel, when you found out that I hadn’t written my speech.”

This is a true story.  We left the church, got into the car, and went off to take the photographs. (This was before the rain started).  And as we finished waving at our guests and drove away, His Nibs turned to me and said

“You wouldn’t have a pen, love, would you?”

“No, I don’t bring a pen to our wedding.  Why would I?  And more to the point, where would I put it?  What do you want a pen for, anyway?”

“I thought I might write my speech.”

There was a long pause.  Not the sort of pause you’re supposed to have within an hour of getting married, where you stare at each other, smiling like idiots, and words aren’t necessary.  This was very much the other sort of pause.  The unhappy sort.

“You didn't write a speech?”

“No.  I didn’t get around to it.”

“You’ve known this wedding is happening on this date for thirteen months, and you never got around to putting your speech together?”

“Well I wasn’t going to write it thirteen months ago, was I?”

“Love, seriously, have you even a first draft of a speech?”

“No.”

His Nibs didn’t look remotely frightened or shaken by my thunderous face.  Nor did he look remotely worried.  He informed me that sure, if he didn’t have a speech, what harm?  He’d do it off the cuff.

I was horrified.  I’ve never known His Nibs to make a public speech, and his making his speech completely off the top of his head was not part of our wedding plan.  But I took a deep breath and let it go.  It gave me something to worry about later.  I think that my letting that go may have set the scene for our future as a married couple.

He gave an off the cuff speech.  I was frantically writing the names of people he had to thank on a serviette and passing them to him.  He didn’t need my help though.  He gave the loveliest speech I’ve ever heard, full of love for everyone, and full of happiness.  I’ve never been prouder of him.

But when quizzed yesterday, this was not his first memory of our wedding day.  The weather was. So I continued to torment him.

Could he name any songs that were played at the reception?

What did we have for our dinner?

Did I make a speech? Did my Dad?  Could he remember anything about either?

Poor His Nibs.  Sitting there, trying to remember minute details of a day fourteen years ago, which he probably hadn’t even noticed at the time.

The difficulty His Nibs faces is that I remember the tiny details of everything.  I can’t remember what I walk up the stairs for, but I remember exactly what song was playing in the nightclub the first time His Nibs asked me to dance, twenty five years ago.  When I find a receipt in the bottom of an old handbag I say annoying things to him like “Oh look, it’s the receipt for the coffee, remember the day we went to Kilkenny and I bought deodorant and you bought socks, remember?”  I’m sure this drives him bonkers. But he smiles and nods, which is enough to keep me happy.  This memory for trivia has been a life long skill of mine.  My brother insists that I’m imagining things when I try to remind him of tiny events that happened in our childhood.

Anyway, I’ve decided that to celebrate this auspicious event, I will take this opportunity to list a few tips on marriage:

Use your tears wisely.  When His Nibs and I moved in together first, every time we started fighting or he was particularly stubborn about something that was important to me, I’d start crying.  This very quickly loses its power.  Before you know where you are, you’ll be getting ready to squeeze out a few tears so that he’ll do the washing up without your input, and he’ll mutter “here comes the waterworks” under his breath.  And that’s a day to remember.  Because that’s the day you’ll realise that you’ve lost your power.  Even when you start crying with good reason.  In my case, I really hurt my finger once when we were both trying to replace a fence panel Poppy had headbutted to death.  It was an actual injury, there was bleeding, and he decided the cut wasn’t as bad as I was making it out to be, and that I should carry on with the work and “don’t start crying”.  If he had had any respect left for the tears, he would have reacted more to my liking.

If, like us, you spend more time than you want to out of your house, because you have to work all the time to pay for the fecking thing, do not spend more than half the time you’re in the house cleaning it.  This is a waste of time.  Especially if you share said house with a husband like mine who leaves an inch of cold coffee in mugs all over the house and who seems to mess up the entire lower level of the house just trimming his beard.  Only a husband like His Nibs, who has a grin that has me for an eejit, can get away with the kind of caper.  Just accept a certain amount of dust and get on with it.

There are rows that you will have for the rest of your lives together.  His Nibs and I haven’t a minute’s luck in the mornings.  There’s unending shouting and roaring and sulking and there would be crying, if it hadn’t lost its power, as set out above, every single morning.  I can’t get up in the mornings, because I go to bed too late.  His Nibs springs out of bed far too early and is bossy and shouty and difficult.  This will never end.  And we’ve decided to accept this.  The fights we have in the mornings end as soon as we get in the car and I go back to sleep, and are not mentioned again.  They don’t count.  The sooner you both decide what your version of our morning row is, the faster you can get over it.

His Nibs says the only thing he ever forces himself to remember as a tip on marriage is “Happy Wife Happy Life.”  I think it’s a bit of a cheek for him to say this.  He couldn’t think disappearing every week to a hurling match, which he records on television while he’s gone, then coming home and watching the same match on television, then watching the highlights again that night, leads to a happy wife.  The only reason he has a happy wife is that he had the presence of mind to marry a woman lazy enough to not get hysterical about these things.  So maybe he’s an oracle of wisdom after all.

I was trying to think up of more questions for him, as our lunch ended.  He’d finished his steak sandwich, and was picking through my leftover pasta, looking for hidden bits of bacon, when he spoke again.

“I remember the wedding song.  It was great.  It was called You’re The One.  And that bit was definitely true.”  He grinned at me, and I grinned back and stopped quizzing him.

This type of talk makes me confident that we’ll make it another year.

Wedding Day Blues

I read a fascinating story in the online newspaper the other day.  A couple in the UK became engaged, which of course is usually a happy enough story.  Unlike some, they moved at a reasonable pace, and proceeded to actually organise a wedding. 

Without the eight year cooling off period His Nibs and I considered sensible.

I have no idea why, but it was decided that the groom would take full responsibility for booking the registry office and for completing all the official paperwork.

He failed to complete either of these tasks, and believe it or not, decided to keep this information to himself.

On the morning of the wedding, the actual morning of the planned nuptials, he finally became hysterical about the whole thing, couldn’t bring himself to confess, and decided that the best thing he could do would be to phone a bomb scare into the registry office.

So that’s what he did.

I’ll repeat that, because it’s so insane I think it bears repeating.  The man never booked his wedding, never told anyone, allowed the whole reception, dresses, cars, and everything else to be organised by his fiancé, and then on the morning of the wedding telephoned the registry office and told them there was a bomb in the building that would explode forty five minutes later.

He then carried on with the day, in fake blissful ignorance.

The bride arrived, along with the bridesmaids and the guests and family and who have you, in her full wedding regalia, to be told that the building had been evacuated and no wedding would be taking place.

Can you believe it?  I think he should have at least turned up early, phoned the bride back, and told her not to bother coming, since the wedding was off.  At least she wouldn't have been left standing on the street like a fool, all dressed up and nowhere to go.

Anyway, he said nothing, and that was, as my mother would say, the rock he perished on.  The bride was outside the registry office, looking at the pointless panic of policemen and bomb disposal experts searching for a bomb that didn’t exist, and happened to ask some official what arrangements would be made to re-schedule her wedding.

At which point she was informed that there was no wedding booked in for that day.  I must say, the registrar must have been pretty surprised, first a bomb scare, and then a full wedding party turning up to watch the drama.

The groom was arrested before the day was out.  I don’t imagine they needed Inspector Morse to  work it out.

He’s facing jail.  Apparently there’s no question of not getting into very serious trouble when you bring out the bomb squad and the police to evacuate a civic building, under false pretences.

What an utter pair of gobshites.  Not just him, but her.

Maybe this sounds sexist, and maybe it's just me (though I doubt it), but seriously. 
Who would accept a proposal, put the groom in charge of ALL the paperwork and booking the actual wedding, and then proceed to arrange dresses, the reception, flowers, music and all the rest of it, secure in the belief that the boyfriend has completed all tasks in the correct and legal manner?

If I’d told His Nibs that he was in charge of this aspect of our wedding, I’d still be a spinster today. 

When we had an appointment with a strange little priest in Dublin to get his Pre Nuptial Inquiry Form, His, now, not mine, he tried to pretend he had flu and send me in his place.

When we went to visit the priest who was actually marrying us, His Nibs didn’t feel comfortable with how well we were all getting along, and started giving him cheek, much to my horror.  This was the parish priest where I'm from.   My mother would have had a fit if she'd heard him, the little pup.

There was absolutely no question of my assuming all was well and spending the run up to the wedding comparing fabric samples, and leaving my much loved His Nibs in charge of the official bits.

I don’t know enough about this story to decide if I feel sorry for the bride or not. 

Maybe she questioned the groom at appropriate intervals about the bookings he was supposed to have made, and he lied into her face and left her to turn up to a bomb disposal outing.

Or maybe she’s such a fecking eejit that she never asked him.  In which case I feel no sympathy whatsoever for her.

I think it’s interesting, though, that although they haven’t married, the couple are still very much together.  Hmmm.

Dear Bride and Groom

Hearty and heartfelt congratulations on your coming wedding, and thanks a million for the invitation.

Unfortunately, His Nibs and I won’t be able to be there on the big day.

Rather than feed you a load of old nonsense about this, I’m going to tell you the real reasons why we won’t be there.

Firstly, I do not have the hundreds of euro necessary to deck myself out, once again, in a colourful dress I’ll only wear once.No, you’re right, you’ve never seen me in a dress worth hundreds of euro in my life. But it’s not only the dress.

It’s the ridiculous pashmina or wrap, in this case it would be a pashmina, since you’ve decided to get married in the middle of the winter.I don’t know why.It’s not the happiest sight, a bright blue bride standing outside the door of the church, hoping in vain that the guests can’t hear her teeth chattering.But far be it from me to offer unwanted opinions.

Then there’s the hat, fascinator or fancy up-do that the hair has to be professionally styled into. God forbid, after all, that a woman go to a wedding with her hair looking anything like it normally does.

And the fake tan, since we’ll all be wearing dresses.And the jewellery to match the dress.The bag, the shoes, it just goes on and on.No matter what shoes I get, my fat ankles always sort of dangle over the sides of them and ruin them.And this is all before we even start thinking about the industrial strength scaffolding that passes as underwear if the dress is bigger than a size 14.

I have absolutely no idea what to buy you as a gift, since I’ve never been inside your house in my life. Like ourselves you’ve been living together for years so I assume a toaster or kettle isn’t necessary.This forces me into a position of trying to guess, just from looking at you, what style your house is decked out in.

I realise I have options on the wedding list, but since the most normal item on there is a set of napkin rings for over a hundred euro, I’m afraid that’s not the road for us.(By the way, please don’t think that we or anyone else think you sit down with linen napkins in rings at dinner time every night – we know bloody well it’ll be Super Noodles once you’re back from your honeymoon, the same as it was before).

Also, I do not have the spare day’s holidays from work.I note from the invitation that you have planned your nuptials for a Thursday – “to make a good long weekend of it” apparently .Do you think the rest of us were born yesterday?  Everyone knows that weddings are cheaper from Monday to Thursday.  Which is fine, I'd get married on a Thursday too, but don't pretend it's for the guests sake.
The problem with a Thursday wedding is that His Nibs and Iwould have to stay overnight (another €200 for the hotel and another reason not to go) and lose a second day from work.

To be honest, we do have the days off coming to us.But we’d much rather spend the time, and the money, on a long weekend in Barcelona during the summer.

Also, due to having a full time job and being more or less a carer for a halfwit husband, I do not have the energy to bring his suit to the dry cleaner’s, or talk him into buying a new one, or keep nagging him to book the day off work.

And you know if we go he’ll only get bored by about 10:30 anyway, and go to bed, leaving the whole place thinking we’ve had a row and he’s gone off sulking.

No, all in all, I think it’s better for all of us, and for our friendship, if we don’t go. I’m sure you won’t mind.Since we haven’t seen each other for three years, I assume we’re only invited to make up the numbers anyway.

If you do mind, please keep it to yourself.If I hear one word of any giving out about us, I will turn up after all and tell them all about the night you both tried out dogging in the Phoenix Park.

Yours in friendship.