Tales From The Hobbit-Hole: The Social Event of 2022

 

Possibly better late than never

 

As many of you know, P and I got spliced last December – on the Winter Solstice, with a date of 21/12/21, so P has no excuse for forgetting our anniversary!

However, due to the Covid pandemic, we had to postpone our reception party. After much deliberation, we finally decided to have the ‘do’ on Saturday 29 October 2022, almost a year after the wedding, and slightly too close to Halloween for comfort – there was always the risk that some people would turn up dressed as zombies or skeletons.

There were several downers in the run-up to the reception, including guests cancelling due to trivial issues such as having a serious heart condition or being stalked by elephants on safari in Kenya. People can be so self-centred! On the morning of the party, one of our neighbours died suddenly and the street was full of police cars and ambulances, which felt like a bad omen. One of our oldest friends, Martin, who was actually supposed to be giving one of the speeches, had to drop out because his elderly mother was in hospital after a fall and had taken a sudden turn for the worse on Saturday morning (she has improved since). We didn’t find out that Martin and his partner wouldn’t be there until the last moment, so there were two empty chairs throughout the meal, like ghosts at the feast!

              Despite this, the party went off fairly well, though there was in the end no dancing, despite the best efforts of my two friends from Kent, both of whom are more than a decade older than me but have twice my energy. I hadn’t seen Jude and Carole in the flesh for many years and when they arrived the day before the reception and we took them to a local restaurant, I flung my arms round them when I saw them, even though I am a non-hugger of long standing. In fact, I must have drunk a little more than I thought because I hugged several people at the reception, including one of P’s university friends whom I barely know, which startled him even more than it startled me!  Anyway, even the good-humoured enthusiasm of Carole and Jude, nor our kick-ass playlist, wasn't enough to get the toes tapping – it was like trying to get the good folk of Bomont to do the macarena.

We had paid a firm of venue decorators to decorate the room, and they did a great job. I spent hours in the run-up to the actual wedding last December, which had a Christmas theme, putting together handmade Christmas crackers, which were surprisingly fiddly and irritating. So, even though it was no longer a Christmas event, I felt obliged to use the crackers. P, the MC and The Best Woman went over to the venue and put them out on the table, along with the name-cards I had made (each with a personalized painting on it) and the favour bags. 

  

Some of the crackers contained those long balloons used by children’s entertainers who make animals out of them. I thought this would keep some guests amused, but the box the balloons came in only contained one little air-pump to blow them up, and people didn’t seem inclined to share it. It was amusing to see guests going purple-faced with the effort of trying to blow up the balloons by mouth. My sister managed to make half a poodle with hers, but it ended up being a kind of hammer that my eight-year-old great-nephew used to hit people on the head with when he became fed-up with the intrinsic dullness of a wedding reception with no drunken dancing. We had feared that he would be bored out of his skull, as the only child present, and of course he was, but we made sure his favour-bag was full of things to entertain him. He spent the first hour being painfully shy and the last being just painful, but I didn’t see much of him in the middle part of the evening.

I had used up all the original silver and white favour bags that I’d prepared last December (we gave them to people as extra Christmas presents along with a piece of our original wedding cake) so I had to buy new ones. However, the only ones I could get hold of at short notice in the right colour were about twice the size of the original ones and I just couldn’t stop myself wanting to fill them up. Several people have commented since, in slightly disapproving tones, that they were ‘rather on the large size’, but my attitude is ‘Who wants three jelly beans in a net bag anyway?’. If you’re going to have a ‘Thank you for coming to the wedding’ gift, it might as well be a large bag stuffed with pointless rubbish rather than a single small example of pointless rubbish. I also printed out the menu choices individuals had made and attached this to the favour bags, which I considered to be a thoughtful and helpful touch, though I was informed by two separate family members that it was an example of my control-freakery.  It didn’t help much anyway, as there was still some confusion when the food was served, particularly because Martin and Angela were absent. One guest didn’t get the pie he'd asked for and ended up having to have the fish instead – but he was compensated to some extent by getting an extra portion of sticky toffee pudding, as my mum couldn’t face hers. He will henceforward be known as ‘Two Puds John’.

P and The Best Woman

Several things failed to go to plan. My hair colour wasn’t quite what I wanted and it wasn’t styled quite as well as on the actual wedding day. I wore the same outfit but bought a new bag and new shoes as the glittery stilettos I wore to the wedding were like instruments of torture, and the matching bag continually slipped off my shoulder. I ended up dropping the new bag into a box in which we’d transported some gifts and, as it had my phone in it, I forgot to take any photos after the first few we took when we arrived. I actually have no photos of myself at the reception at all.

              Though the staff worked very hard, the woman who was supposedly in charge, Natalie, wasn’t there as it was her day off, and there were several minor things which didn’t go the way she had assured us they would. They thought the meal was happening at 7.30 rather than 7.00; they said they would provide a child menu for our single child guest but we had to ask for this; there was no rack for people to hang their coats on so we had to pile all the coats on a table at the back of the room. The room was incredibly warm, particularly once everyone arrived, and several of us ended up chatting in the car-park just to cool down – it was an unseasonably warm evening for late October in Yorkshire! The venue appeared to have two large windows which were covered by blinds, but in fact these were either windows that couldn’t be opened or else they were bricked up! The staff didn’t turn the music off during the speeches, until we actually asked them to, halfway through the first speech. The waitress was standing right next to the music system at the time, but our hand gestures and meaningful facial expressions didn’t cut through her screensaver day-dream  and the groom had to get up, go over to her and ask her to turn it off, during the MC’s opening words.

              There was a remarkably steep staircase with a wobbly banister up to the actual room where the reception party took place. I had to hoist myself up, hand-over-hand, as if dragging myself aboard a schooner in choppy waters, and there were many people there older or even more infirm than me. My friend’s husband, who has ‘a wonky ankle’, managed to both fall up the stairs and slip coming down, and he wasn’t even drunk. However, he also tripped over a plant pot in the outdoor seating area on his way to his car, so I think he was just having a Norman Wisdom evening.

Natalie had also assured me that the chef at the venue would cut up the wedding cake, but when I asked the waitress, she shrugged and said the chef had gone home! We had paid for an expensive, professionally-made cake for the original wedding reception last December, so we had decided to just buy a pre-made one this time from Marks and Spencers or somewhere, but our friend Helen stepped in and made us an absolutely delicious cake (fruit cake on bottom layer, chocolate cake on top) which she iced and decorated with autumnal flowers, rosehips, pine cones etc. It was gorgeous. The waitress gave us a ridiculously pathetic knife so that Helen could cut up the cake herself, which I was embarrassed about.

The Wedding Cake, decorated with Autumnal flowers and foliage

The highlight of the evening was of course the speeches. I wasn’t giving one myself so I was able to sit back and quietly make judgements on the performances of others. I was hoping they would be short and sweet but this wasn’t quite what happened. The Best Woman's speech was beyond reproach, but then she is female. P’s speech was heartfelt but due to his insistence on mentioning everyone who was present, it went on a bit – and even then he forgot to mention his university friends and quickly added them in just before the toast. He wouldn’t let me see or hear his speech before the event, but when I saw the number of A4 sheets he took out of his pocket, my heart sank! 

He’d been worried that the suit he’d worn for the wedding would now, eight months later, be too tight but in fact he just squeezed into it. However, after his pie and sticky toffee pudding, the waistcoat was rather tight so, as he stood up to deliver his speech, he unbuttoned it, saying ‘If wearing an unbuttoned waistcoat is good enough for Art Garfunkel, it's good enough for me’. Later, the Best Woman –  who was sitting opposite him –  told me that his fly was partially open, so it looked as if he was deliberately exposing himself to the guests, possibly as a form of performance art. I don’t think many people noticed, however.

The MC made the biggest impression. I have to say that he was brilliant at greeting the guests, taking their coats, liaising with the staff, keeping things moving and chatting to people, and we are both very grateful to him for this. Before the meal, his impromptu shoe-exploding act was pure genius (the heels of his Ecco shoes spontaneously fell off, quite spectacularly, something we later discovered happens to around 1% of Ecco shoes due to something called Hydrolysis, and it even happened to someone at a swish do where Joe Biden was a guest, apparently, so the MC is in good company). However, it did mean he had to spend the remainder of the evening walking round more or less in his socks. We suggested he might craft makeshift heels out of Pontefract Cakes [licorice] stuck on with sticky toffee pudding, but he didn’t seem convinced.

          His own speech was more 1970s Working Men’s Club than 2022 Wedding Reception, but it was nice of him to have put in so much effort. At one point he pretended he’d got a call from the owner of The Spencer Arms (where the venue was) and he left the room, only to return wearing a beret and doing an impersonation of Frank Spencer. Those who remembered the pub was called The Spencer Arms, and who were old enough to remember Michael Crawford’s hapless character, enjoyed this, but many of us were mystified. For younger guests, the impersonation was incomprehensible as they had no idea who Frank Spencer was, which in itself actually made many of us feel like dinosaurs from a lost world. And for people like myself who did remember Frank Spencer, but who didn’t make the connection with the pub’s name until some time afterwards, it seemed like a rather random and bewilderingly outdated character to impersonate. However, the MC’s speech will go down in everyone’s memory as a highlight of the evening. Personally, I know I’ll remember the exploding shoes with fondness for many years to come. 

Check out Carole and Jude's article about their experiences in Barnsley [below]