This month, Ian Sansom talks weddings.
Love and marriage
Column / Life & Times
T
his month I’m going to England: my
sister’s getting married. Remarried, I
should say. Married again. Whatever’s
the appropriate term. This is her second
marriage: her new partner’s on her third. My
wife has already vetoed most of my jokes for
the speech - third time lucky, good to see so
many familiar faces, and various hilarious
riffs on the theme of the triumph of hope over
experience. Basically, all I’ve got left is mazel
tov. (I’m not even allowed to quote Oscar Wilde.
I was planning a complex reinterpretation
and regendering around his remark that
‘When a woman marries again it is because
she detested her first husband. When a man
marries again it is because he adored his first
wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.’)
We haven’t had a family wedding for a while
- the children are too young, and the rest of
us too old. I’d forgotten all the hoo-hah that
comes with a wedding. In the Marvelous Mrs
Maisel - Amazon Prime, highly recommended,
if you like your New York Jewish period
comedy drama - the eponymous Mrs Maisel is
planning her second wedding with her mother,
Rose. A first wedding is a proper sit-down meal,
says Rose. A second wedding is just family and
friends for lunch. ‘And a third wedding?’ asks
Mrs Maisel. ‘Over my dead body,’ says Rose.
Times have changed. My sister’s wedding is
a sit-down meal, an evening do, a band - the
full works. One of our sons has agreed to
DJ, though exactly how his taste in obscure
electronica, grime, trip-hop and noise is
going to go down remains to be seen: all the
guests are going to be gagging for ‘Oops
Upside Your Head’ and ‘We Are Family’.
Fancy dresses - matching suits, in fact, for
the brides-to-be - have been purchased.
Hairdresser appointments have been booked.
And I have been told to go to the barber for
my annual beard trim. (Any barbers in the
Greater Belfast area, if you’re reading this,
when I say ‘trim’ I really do mean ‘trim’ - at
my age I really can’t carry off that designer
stubble look, or the ornate hipster thing with
the curly moustache and the sharp angles.
When I say trim what I mean is leave it exactly
the way it looked before, only more so.)
It’ll be nice to see everyone - the cousins,
the nephews and nieces, the few remaining of
the old guard. It seems like just a few years
ago that I used to go to weddings with all these
funny old uncles - men in ill-fitting suits
telling stories about the good old days, how
they snuck into the FA Cup Final under the
fence, and how you used to be able to buy fresh
pickled herring out of a barrel on Petticoat
Lane market. Now suddenly I’m the funny
old uncle in an ill-fitting suit, telling stories
about the first time I saw the Clash, and the
first Chinese takeaway back home in Harlow.
I was talking to my friend Jimmy in
work and he was saying that he’d been to
a wedding recently that had started out
in Belfast and ended up two days later in
Dublin - which is quite a do. And our Indianfriends have been threatening for years to
take us to a proper 3 day Hindu wedding.
To be honest, I can’t do much more than a
couple of hours at most social events before
I need a bit of a lie down. Fortunately, there
are so many of us are staying at my mum’s
for the wedding that we’ve sent a couple of
spare mattresses over in the post. You won’t
believe how much it costs to send a mattress
in the post - but it’s going to be worth it.
The thing I really must remember to do is
to bring plenty of tissues. I don’t think I’ve
ever been to a wedding when I haven’t shed a
lot of tears - tears of joy. My wife, a Northern
Protestant, is always amazed at my family’s
propensity to burst into tears - men and
women - at any and every family occasion. But
surely if you’re not going to cry at a wedding,
when are you going to cry? A wedding is such
a wonderful, ludicrous expression of hope in
the face of the overwhelming logic of despair,
what else can you do but cry? We swim in
an ocean of tears. Like I say, mazel tov!Ian Sansom
Ian Sansom writes for the Guardian. He is the author of the County Guides and the Mobile
Library series of novels. His most recent book is December Stories I (No Alibis Press).Finalist PPa Independent
Publisher awards 2018-
Writer Of The Year18“ I don’t think
I’ve ever been to
a wedding when
I haven’t shed
a lot of tears -
tears of joy.”
Illustration by Jacky Sheridan