Wedding update

 

Two declarations and hopefully no funeral

Our wedding has expanded slightly from our initial conception – having transformed from ‘cheap’ and ‘secret’ to ‘more expensive’ and ‘incomprehensibly complex’ – but it is still, essentially, a modest affair. Therefore, it’s surprising to me that it feels like a series of puzzles, riddles and obstacles that I’m slightly too incompetent to fully understand.

Neither of us is good at organizing stuff, but, in the past at any rate, I have generally been considered to be the more efficient of the pair, so most of the organizing has been left to me. And let’s just say that I’m not doing too well so far…

I’ll give you an example.

Have you noticed how, in American sitcoms and romcoms, within a millisecond of proposing, couples seem able to marry, anywhere they like, with one of their mates performing the duties of a registrar/priest after getting a quick online certificate? You never see any couple on TV having to make an appointment at the Town Hall in order to formally notify the authorities of their intention to get married and declare that they are not related to each other, already hitched to another or under duress, and that they are happy to have this information made public for at least 29 days so that anyone who disputes the legality of the marriage has the opportunity to come forward, do you?

I suppose this is the secular version of having the banns read out in church. I’ve always secretly thought it would be rather cool to have some breathless stranger arrive mid-service, like Bertha Rochester’s brother, shouting out an objection to the marriage at the eleventh hour: ‘LOUISE WILFORD IS ALREADY MARRIED! I HAVE PROOF THAT SHE MARRIED BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IN 2010 AND HE DESPERATELY WANTS HER BACK!’. It wouldn’t have quite the same dramatic impact, though, in the ceremony suite at the Town Hall.

My first error was trying to make an appointment by phone. I am so naïve! After dialling the number, I listened, for twenty minutes, to Mozart being played on an accordian, interrupted every 30 seconds by a pre-recorded voice which sounded like Philomena Cunk telling me I was the first person in the queue. The person before me must have had a very complicated query, or else Philomena was lying. In the end, I decided to make the appointment online, and – like many things I try to do these days – I did it wrong. I thought I had booked an appointment for 11.30 on a Thursday in August, but when we arrived, we discovered that the booking hadn’t worked.

‘But I definitely booked,’ I said, feeling the red mist begin to descend. ‘I had a confirmation email.’

‘It isn’t on our records,’ said the twelve-year-old boy behind the counter. ‘And I’m afraid our registrars are really busy today so there aren’t any appointments left. We have weddings going on all day.’  As if to confirm this, we caught a glimpse of a white-frocked bride scuttling past the end of the corridor; a similarly-bedecked bride and her groom had been having photos taken on the steps of the Town Hall as we’d arrived, and, as we were directed to the registrar’s office, we’d noticed another couple heading towards the ceremony suite. It was slightly surreal, like stepping into a peculiar dream.  If someone did want to burst into the ceremony suite to stop a wedding, they’d be lucky to get the right one, considering the conveyor-belt of happy couples.

‘But we’ve both taken days off work to come here,’ I lied in an outraged voice.

The young man looked as if he was about to go full nervous breakdown. ‘Let me go and talk to someone…’ he muttered, before hurrying off down the corridor, presumably to find a prefect. He was gone for some time while we waited outside the office, P patiently and me muttering behind my Covid mask as I was at this point convinced it was their mistake. Finally, he returned with the news that one of the registrars had agreed to interview us in her lunch hour so we had to return at one thirty.

Back home, I discovered that I hadn’t actually ever received a confirmation email after all. Clearly, the whole thing was my error, though I still have no idea what I did or didn’t do. Slightly chastened, we returned for the one thirty meeting.

We had to be interviewed separately as if one of us was an illegal immigrant without a green card attempting to engage in a marriage of convenience. It’s just as well we weren’t as I got P’s birthday wrong, twice.

‘I know it’s in January,’ I said, lamely. ‘And in the teens.’ Fortunately, the pleasant registrar had by this time realized I was a post-menopausal woman and put me out of my misery by telling me what date the man I’d lived with for thirty years was born.

She didn’t ask for the names of our witnesses, which surprised me, as P and I had once been witnesses at a friend’s registry office wedding (in another town) and we’d arrived late, having got lost – we held up the whole wedding as they couldn’t just use two other random people as witnesses (another movie cliché exposed for the nonsense it is!), as our names were already on the official documents. She did, however, want to know the names and professions of both sets of parents. I actually know very little about my own father and I didn’t think ‘possibly deceased roofer, pub singer and all-round fuckwit’ sounded right, so that was slightly awkward.

When I emerged and P went in, I had a vague unease that he might say things which contradicted my answers, like in that old TV programme ‘Mr and Mrs’ where couples used to reveal the fragility of their marriages based on their mutual lack of knowledge about each other. Perhaps they’d tell us we’d failed the exam?

While I was waiting for him, there was a sudden surge of movement in the corridor and several members of staff began half-running back and forth into the main office. Apparently, a female staff member had somehow fallen, badly enough I believe to lose consciousness for a few seconds and be unable to rise from the floor. A younger woman who appeared to be wearing a hessian sundress closed the office door very ostentatiously  as if she was worried that me and the young Asian girl beside me in the corridor might be tempted to force our way in to have a good old rubber-neck at the prostrate woman. A short fat man with an official-looking lanyard round his neck kept asking if anyone had phoned an ambulance. I’m not sure if he ever got a reply.

P emerged from his interrogation, followed by the registrar. She had to go into the office to get the card machine so I could pay the £70 fee I had failed to pay online, and as she did so we caught a fleeting glimpse of the prone woman’s feet, toes upturned like in a cartoon.

As we left the building, the short fat man was waiting at the door to greet the ambulance that was presumably, at that very moment, speeding through the streets of Barnsley from the hospital half a mile away. Dodging another bride, we stepped out into the August rain feeling the mild euphoria that accompanies the aftermath of any interaction with local bureaucracy. I think it’s caused by relief that it’s over. We were one step closer to our goal.

I almost tripped down the steps into the Cooper Gallery next door, where we’d decided to get some lunch and use up the remaining time on our parking meter, but P managed to grab my arm before I did one of my now-commonplace spectacular public falls-on-my-arse.   So all-in-all it was a day well-spent.