Tales of a Middle-aged Newly-wed

Another Middle-aged Couple Joins The Club!

This is how you know you’ve reached the age where senility is setting in:

You open your purse in order to give your husband some money you owe him, and start counting coins into his hand – ‘…ten….twenty….thirty….forty….’.

Then you become aware that he’s staring at you with a mixture of concern and amusement on his face, and you realise you’re placing random coins on his palm – a 50p, a 10p, a 5p, a 2p, a pound coin. What your mouth is saying bears no relationship to the actual amount of money you’re giving him.

When I saw what I was doing, I laughed – but inside I was thinking ‘Am I finally losing my marbles?’. However, it wasn’t evidence of incipient dementia, but of my state of exhaustion following my sister’s wedding in Macclesfield last Friday. And we didn’t even stay to the end. Lord knows how tired Sis and Bro-In-Law were next day.

We spent the night before the wedding in a Premier Inn and went out for a meal with Sis and Bro-In-Law. Unfortunately, I started feeling seriously nauseous about eleven o'clock in the evening, and as a result got hardly any sleep and couldn't eat any breakfast on Friday morning. My upset digestive system wasn’t caused by the meal, as no one else felt ill. The nausea had more or less gone by the morning but I felt very tired.

I was supposed to be having my hair done at 10.30 by the hairdresser who was doing my sister's hair, but I had to skip this and instead just straighten it with what I considered to be my very expensive top-quality straighteners. However, fifteen minutes before the ceremony, my niece looked at my coiffure, pulled a pitying face, and said: ‘Let me straighten you hair for you with my straighteners’. Five minutes later, my hair was beautifully straightened and I’m now planning on replacing my straighteners with some like hers, which obviously run on magic.

The ceremony was at 2.00, and by then I felt more or less back to normal and was able to drink a couple of glasses of wine.

It was a much more expensive wedding than ours, and it showed. One thing we did spend money on, in our own wedding, was the venue decorators, and they did a great job. Sis, however, skilfully made all her own decorations, including artificial flower garlands for the tables, buttonholes and her bouquet, judiciously-placed lanterns and hurricane lamps, a post box for wedding cards and decorated gin bottles telling people where to sit [see link to my sister's small business at end of this post]. My mum, who was sitting near me directly in front of one of the lanterns, told me later, in a disappointed tone, that she'd never seen any lanterns on the tables! She obviously had the one which was invisible to elderly women. 

The venue, an old pub-cum-hotel, was lovely – the ceremony and reception were in a very old barn with twinkling fairy lights round the beams. It was very romantic. The food was nice and the staff were efficient and pleasant.

 

  

Sis walked down the aisle with my husband, who was ‘giving her away’, standing in for our actual father. My husband is only four years older than my sister but he has had a grey beard and grey hair for at least a decade and people often think he’s older than he is. This proves the effectiveness of stereotypes – people see the grey beard and assume he is in his seventies rather than his fifties. When this is combined with people seeing him walking a bride down the aisle, they assume he’s her father, even though he mentioned in his brief speech that he wasn’t. Several people referred to Sis’s father, so it was fortunate that he didn’t hear them – however, this suggests even more strongly that I am married to a man old enough to be my own father, as he is clearly going deaf.

They hired a suit for hubby, one which matched the groom's and the groom's son's. My husband is not a fashionable man. He's the kind of man who makes everything he wears look a tad shabby and worn-out, even when it's brand-new. He had also put on some weight since his fitting for the suit, so he was greatly relieved when it actually still fit him. The shoes chosen by Sis to go with the ensemble were brown brogues with blue inserts, the kind of two-tone shoes that used to be referred to as 'co-respondent shoes', and he was never likely to wear them again as they hinted at 'style' or 'pzazz', neither of which are his things.  He gave them back to Sis after the wedding so she could try to sell them. He was allowed to keep his white shirt with cufflinks, however - so, as he said, 'The day wasn't a complete waste' [he was joking].

 

Not the bride's father!

 

Sis’s partner’s son carried the rings, and he and my niece were the witnesses. I was told by the registrar moments before the ceremony began that I would be the flower-holder, as Sis had forgotten to tell me (or I had forgotten), but it wasn’t an onerous job as bouquets aren’t very heavy. Bro-In-Law’s son did muddle up the rings momentarily, and the photographer dropped his lens cap just as the ceremony began, but other than those minor hiccups all went well.

The civil ceremony itself was substantially longer than our own ceremony at Barnsley Town Hall – they said a great deal more than we had to, which actually left me feeling short-changed - though obviously I have no idea by how much [see paragraph one].

Signing the register

Guests then gathered in the Orangery, before returning to the barn for the Wedding Breakfast, as it is called, even though this one took place in the late afternoon so should probably be called the Wedding High Tea. Nice food was followed by a cabaret act, The Singing Waiters – a duo who sung popular songs with comic interludes and a slightly uncomfortable amount of audience participation for my taste! Sis and Niece were, predictably, very merry and enthusiastic, which was great to see. I joined in with the napkin-waving, hand-holding, swaying, clapping, singing, with what at the time felt like gusto – I was actually enjoying it. However, on the videos I saw afterwards, I look like I’m taking part under duress – obviously, this is just my ‘resting bitch-face’!

My husband (who is the reason we didn’t have dancing at our wedding, because he has never shown any evidence of having a sense of rhythm and has always claimed that the idea of dancing makes him feel physically sick), must have drunk a lot because I’ve never before seen him so enthusiastic in such a situation! One of the singing waiters commented: ‘Look, the bride’s father’s really getting into it!’.  

 

The Singing Waiters

My elderly mum left before the singing waiters arrived, as she wanted a lie-down in her room. This was just as well as I don't think she'd have enjoyed the audience participation as she's very shy and she'd been sitting very close to where they did their act.

The singing waiters were very good and got people in the mood for the evening’s dancing, during which Sis and Bro-In-Law performed a first dance they had been rehearsing for months. They did it very well and their dance teacher, who was there, gave them his seal of approval. There was a buffet later and they had a beautiful cake, which they cut in the traditional manner, both people holding a single knife between them and making a single incision through the belly of the beast, before waiting staff took it off to be professionally dissected (just like you would do at home). I only saw this on video later, however, as I went to check on mum after the singing waiters, and started feeling nauseous again so I decided to call it a day.. 

 

Wedding Cake

My great-nephew told me afterwards that he liked my reception better than his nanny’s, which of course was great to hear (😂), but it was only because ours was ‘quieter’! He has hyperacusis, a hypersensitivity to noises, and he found the singing waiters and the dance music a bit overwhelming. In reality, Sis's wedding was very different from ours and much more elegant and traditional. It was also considerably livelier and everything went more smoothly. 

Great-nephew very much enjoyed the flashing yoyo and various other gewgaws he was given by his grandma to keep him occupied during the meal, however.

 

    

 

Great-nephew

I took great-nephew with me to check on his great-grandma, to give him a break from the noise. It had been raining heavily and I was wearing heels, which I don’t normally wear, and predictably I slipped outside my mum’s room and fell into a very wet dogwood shrub [notice how I avoided writing ‘wet bush’ there!]. I only stopped myself falling down completely by grabbing hold of the bush itself and soaking myself to the skin in a shower of rainwater. I don’t think any of the other wedding guests saw me, thank goodness, except for Great-nephew who stared at me in wordless shock. There were a few staff members knocking about, however, who probably thought I was drunk. If only...

 

Arrival of the bride and groom

I ended up going to bed about nine o’clock, which makes me feel incredibly old and boring. Next morning, however, it was a beautiful spring day. I felt fine and was able to scoff a delicious full English breakfast, before we drove home, so the whole experience ended well!

And there was wedding cake to eat later...[one tier choc and caramel, the other white rum, lime and coconut, if you're interested].

Congratulations, 

Sis and Bro-In-Law!

CHECK OUT THE SITES:

Nic's Crafty Corner   [Sis's craft small business, making bespoke greetings cards, gift boxes/bags, ornaments, photo albums, mementos, etc] 

https://www.facebook.com/nicscraftroom/

Singing Waiters:   

@singalongwaiters