1) COST. Ladies! Being a woman is already very, very expensive. Tampons, hairdressers, childcare, beauty aids, women’s shoes being three times more costly than men’s – the combination of the things we need (Lil-lets) combined with the things we feel naked without (proper haircut) is already ruinous. And that’s before we factor in both women earning 30 per cent less than men and being the ones who usually have to watch their career go all Titanic when the question of ‘Who will look after the kids?’ raises its head.
In the old days, the question of a dowry would often be one of the deciding factors of a woman’s life: how much money her parents could settle on a marriage dictating whom a woman could and couldn’t marry.
These days, of course, a woman is free to marry whomsoever she chooses. And yet, marriage still often involves crippling sums of money – the average cost of a UK wedding is £21,000 – but now commonly paid for by the couple themselves, in some kind of bizarre, voluntary, ultimately useless but self-imposed dowry. Spending £21,000 at a stage in your life when you are – usually – still pretty poor, and trying to buy things like ‘a house’ and ‘things to eat’ seems pretty baffling, whichever way you slice it – not least when one in four marriages ends in divorce.
If we were inventing things from scratch, surely we would decide to throw a gigantic £21,000 celebration of love right at the end of the whole thing – when we’re in our sixties and seventies, the mortgage is paid off, and we can see if the whole ‘I love you forever’ thing actually worked out or not.
£21,000! Oh, it makes me cry. Personally, I wouldn’t spend £21,000 on anything that didn’t have either a) doors and windows or b) the ability to grant me three wishes. £21,000 is an absurd amount of money to spend on something. It is a figure that denotes insanity.
The money thing is a key issue here – because of what it is spent on. Aside from getting together the deposit for a house, the average couple will probably never again spend that amount of money on a single thing in their lives. And what is it that that £21,000 buys? Very little that lasts. There are the overpriced photographs in the insanely expensive album, and all the presents, of course – but spending £21,000 to get £2,000’s worth of kitchenware from John Lewis is poor economics, whichever way you slice it. The dress is never worn again, you never get round to ‘dying the shoes red, and wearing them to a party!’, no matter how often you convince yourself you might, and as for the rings – well, I can hardly be the only married woman on her fifth wedding band, after losing various others in swimming pools, down cracks in worktops and, once, in a loaf of bread (it’s a long story).
What the £21,000 buys you is Aspect Two of why weddings are so bad for women:
2) THE BEST DAY OF YOUR LIFE. ‘It’s the best day of your life.’ Well. The snags here are obvious. Of course it’s not the best day of your life. A day that was really the best day of your life wouldn’t involve Uncle Wrong, Aunt Drip, and someone from your office you had to invite, lest you spend the next six years being sulked at every time you pass them in a stairwell.
Clearly – with these enforced parameters – your wedding is actually like some unholy melange of some works away-day and family therapy, and should, therefore, be regarded with the same mixture of quiet stoicism, grim determination and heavy drinking.
Also, bear this in mind, ladies – the phrasing: ‘the best day of your life’. Yes, the best day of your life: the bride. Not anyone else’s. Let’s face it – from time immemorial, the groom has quietly not given a shit about the event, from beginning to end. If you want to plunge a grown man into a combination of deep despair and barely repressed panic, simply talk to him, for a minute or more, about table arrangements, boutonnières, flower girls’ shoes, marquees, the hiring of a castle, what Madonna did for her wedding, and whether or not you should have a colonic a week before, to look ‘fresh-faced’.
Weddings are essentially something that brides invite grooms along to as an afterthought – and a thought that came after working out which trios of chocolate puddings were going to be served, at that. Women start planning their weddings when they’re five, for goodness’ sake. When they have no idea who they’re marrying, and just imagine an Action Man’s body with a convenient pixellation where his face is. By way of comparison, at the same age, the only future event boys are planning is how they might be able to score the winning goal in the World Cup whilst, at the same time, playing the guitar solo to ‘November Rain’ by Guns N’ Roses.
So it’s clearly not the best day of the groom’s life. And it’s also not the best day of any of the guests’ lives, either. Because weddings aren’t fun for the guests. It’s something we’re wholly aware of when we’re guests – 300 miles from home, in a pashmina, making awkward chitty-chat with a bleary drunkard on the table clearly referred to as ‘The Dregs’ in the placement plans – but forget the minute we start planning our own weddings.
‘I can’t believe Carrie dragged us all to the sodding Isle of Skye for her wedding,’ we moan, staring at our overdrafts. ‘Three bloody days in a four-star hotel. She’d better not divorce him. Indeed, I feel inclined to sew them together, so they cannot stray – like the Human Caterpillar.’
‘Where do you want to get married, then?’ someone may ask. ‘Singapore!’ you cry, enthusiastically. ‘We’re inviting everyone over for a week! On day three, there’s a boat trip to a deserted island – only £75 extra for each person! It’s going to be AMAZING!’
*
I did it myself. Up until my actual wedding, I’d done everything brilliantly. I had so not been a twat about being in love. I wasn’t over-dramatic or attention-seeking. I had recovered from breaking up with Courtney by the simple expediency of making a cheerful badge that read ‘I Went Out With Satan – And Survived!’ and wearing it to all social engagements – thus answering any and all questions about the status of our relationship, just by pointing at it.
I didn’t mope, and I didn’t sulk – instead, I made up for a year of ill-rewarded fidelity by cheerfully going back out into the world, and seeing if there was any fun left out there for me. As it turned out, there was loads. Every night was like a sexy trolley-dash – racing around London, being all twinkly-eyed with anyone amusing, up against the clock of the last bus home. One evening with a pop star ended with his manager having to remove him, naked, from my hotel bedroom at 3am.
A week later, and a teenage boy literally turned up on my doorstep – who knew they did deliveries these days? – and was so unexpectedly tender and joyful, he undid half of Courtney’s evil over one, sunny winter afternoon, and night of exclaiming wonder.
In both instances, I was gratified to note that getting back out ‘on the dating scene’ required – contrary to everything I’d ever been given to understand on the subject – absolutely no effort or insecurity at all. There was no ‘post-break-up make-over’ for me. I’d put on a stone, and cut a bad fringe; but I was so happy, no one appeared to notice it. With the eventually-unconscious pop star, I simply asked the question, ‘Shall we have a shag?’ With the teenage boy, meanwhile, I made my move whilst in the deathlessly hot outfit of a burgundy-coloured BHS towelling robe, £19.99.
For a month, I rode some kind of relaxed sex galleon around London, like a lady pirate – remembering, again, how every conversation with a member of the opposite sex carries with it that tiny, atom-small, atomic-bright possibility: ‘Hello. Are you “it”?’
And every Thursday, I would invite over Pete from Melody Maker, cook him soup, and tell him all these stories – ‘So I rang down to Room Service, and asked for a steak sandwich, and a pair of men’s pants’ – while we played records, and cried laughing.
Then, in the middle of February, my mood, suddenly, changed.
I woke one Monday morning to find an odd, albatross-unhappiness had descended. It wasn’t depression, or misery – it was both more restless, and more hopeful, than that. I felt suspended: a combination of waiting for something, and missing something terribly – even t
hough I’d never had it.
Indeed, not only had I never had it – I also had no idea what it was. The source of my blues absolutely baffled me. I spent a week wandering around my flat, deflated – clueless as to what it meant. I’d pick something up – my phone, a record, a fag – and then put them down again, sadly, going, ‘No, that’s not it.’
Twice I went to the shops to buy food and, halfway around the supermarket, I’d think, ‘When I get back, it might have happened!’ I’d bustle back, full of energy and hope again, and burst into the flat – only to find it exactly as I’d left it. Whatever it was still hadn’t arrived.
The disappointment was crushing.
After a week of this, on the Sunday night, my subconscious – as if exasperated at my dimness – finally spelt it out for me. I went to bed drunk, and dreamed I was on the escalators at Baker Street underground station, going up. The escalators seemed impossibly high. I couldn’t even see the top. It was going to be a long, long time before I got to the turnstiles.
‘It’s going to take forever to get up there!’ I exclaimed.
‘It’s OK,’ a voice said. I turned around, and saw Pete, standing behind me. ‘I’m here,’ he said, simply.
‘Oh!’ I said, waking up.
‘Oh!’
‘I’m in love! I’m in love with Pete.’
I looked around the flat.
‘He’s what’s not here.’
Six years and a £19.99 engagement ring later, and it’s our wedding day. It was – initially – going to be in a registry office, in London, followed by a reception at a pub. In boring, empty mid-October. Everyone could have got the bus home. It would have cost less than 200 quid. We could have knocked it all off in five hours flat. Oh, I wish we’d had that wedding.
After I’d inhaled 600 bridal magazines and taken into account a few requests from the in-laws, however, it ended up being in a former monastery in Coventry, two days after Christmas. Coincidentally, also Caz’s birthday. She has always borne the brunt of the love of others.
I don’t want to exaggerate but, by God, it was a bad wedding.
Here I am, at 24, waiting to come down the aisle in my red velvet dress, with ivy in my hair. I look like Lady Bacchus, except for my feet. My lifelong curse of not being able to find shoes I can walk in extends even here, on my most glamorous day – under the satin-edged velvet, I’m wearing a manky pair of Doc Marten sandals.
My father is in a suit he shoplifted from Ciro Citterio, and some shoes he shoplifted from Burtons – but he looks calm, wise and not a little emotional about giving away his first child in marriage.
‘Oh, my lovely daughter,’ he says, smelling a little of whisky. ‘My kitten-cat.’ His eyes have the faint shine of tears in them. As the music strikes up in the next room – the slow, village march of The Lilac Time’s ‘Spin A Cavalu’ – he takes my arm, and leans in to whisper something. This is where he tells me something of how he and Mum have stayed together for 24 years, and had eight kids, I think to myself. This is going to be one of our great bonding moments. Oh Lord, I hope he doesn’t make me cry. I have so much eyeliner on.
‘Darling girl,’ he says, as the usher opens the door, and I see the whole congregation crane around, to watch my entrance. ‘Darling love. Remember you’re a Womble.’
I walk down the aisle so fast that, halfway down, I realise I’m going to get there way before the music finishes. I also note that I am beaming, rather smugly – and I worry how the registrar will take this.
She will think I’m not serious about this! I panic. She’ll REFUSE to marry me, on the grounds I’m SUPERCILIOUS!
I immediately slow down to a funereal pace, and assume a look of burdened worry. Later, my sisters tell me they were convinced that I’d just got the first twinge of cystitis, and that they’d all automatically reached into their handbags for a bottle of potassium citrate, which we all carry around with us.
Still, I look fine compared to my husband-to-be. He’s so nervous he’s a very pale green, and is shaking like a sock on a washing line.
‘I’ve never seen a more anxious groom,’ the registrar confides, later. ‘I had to give him two shots of whisky.’
I can’t remember anything about the ceremony. I spent the whole thing going, ‘REMEMBER you’re a WOMBLE?’ in my head, in outrage.
An hour later, and everyone’s in the bar. Many of our invited guests haven’t been able to make it, because it’s two days after Christmas, and they’re with their families in Scotland, Devon and Ireland. My family are taking advantage of the free bar – many of them can’t walk any more, and, of the ones that can, two of them have found a memorial to a dead knight, and are giving his statue a ‘saucy’ pole dance.
My dad, meanwhile, has managed to spill candle wax all over his shirt and has – on the advice of others – taken it off, and put it into a freezer in the kitchen, to harden the wax. He is now sitting at the table in his vest and jacket, drinking Guinness, looking bleary. My sister Col has disappeared – we find out later this is because Dad told her he’d considered having her put into care after that time she stole all his Disney DVDs and power tools, and sold them for drugs.
‘I was only joking!’ he says, eyes rolling in his head. ‘Or was I?’
In order to ‘find’ her, my brother Eddie tries to steal a golf buggy, so he can drive around looking for her. Two other siblings have to stand in front of him, saying ‘NO!’
By the time the reception starts, a quiet aura of failure pervades the event. As it is two days after Christmas, the guests who have trekked to Coventry in the middle of their Christmas holidays feel too fat and lethargic for a disco, and my husband’s insistence that he be the DJ results in our First Dance being, incongruously, ‘Ask’ by The Smiths. We try, ineffectually, to slow-dance to it, on a wholly empty dance floor, as everyone watches us doing a romantic ‘indie shuffle’. When the next song comes on – ‘Always On My Mind’ by the Pet Shop Boys – two new people join us on the dance floor. They are my new father-in-law, and our friend Dave, who has been off his face on Ecstasy for around three hours now.
Dave dances towards my father-in-law, in the manner of Bez catching butterflies.
‘Have one of my pearls,’ he says to my father-in-law, opening his hand and revealing £300’s worth of pills.
‘My father doesn’t want a Tic-Tac, thanks,’ Pete says, firmly escorting Dave out of the room.
By 10pm, most people have gone to bed early – trying to salvage some aspect of being dragged to an expensive hotel in the middle of their holidays. I like to think they are all eating sausage rolls, stolen from the buffet, and watching Cheers. I am happy for them. I wish I was one of them. I talk to a sad Greek in-law, head to toe in black, still mourning someone who died in 1952. I smile weakly.
I notice she – along with all my Greek in-laws – seems to have rendered herself willingly and wholly blind to the fact that my bridesmaid was a six-foot-two gay man called Charlie, who was wearing silver trousers and a pink cape. They only ever mention the other bridesmaid – Polly. Whose bra is visible above her strapless dress, and is rocking a tattoo of a dolphin saying ‘Fuck’.
At 10.23pm, the fire alarm goes off. As everyone shiveringly evacuates onto the lawn, I notice all of my siblings are missing. Going back into the hotel to find them – like Mr Blunden in The Amazing Mr Blunden – I knock on the door of my sister’s room. I find all seven siblings in here – standing on the bed, waving room-service menus under the smoke detector.
‘Why aren’t you evacuating?’ I ask, standing in the doorway in my wedding dress.
They all turn to face me. They are all wearing balloon crowns made by the Balloon Animal man we’d hired, to entertain the kids. Eddie is holding a balloon sword.
‘It’s sensed our body heat!’ Weena says, stoned, and panicked. ‘There’s only supposed to be two people in here but we all bunked in, and now it’s overheated the room! We’re trying to cool it down!’
They carry on waving their
room-service menus at the ceiling. The fire alarm stops ringing. It’s 10.32pm. I’m married. I go to bed.
In the following 11 years, not one guest ever mentions our wedding again. We all seem to silently agree that it’s for the best.
Still, at least I was a merciful bride in one respect: there was no hen night. I spent the night before eating crisps with my siblings and watching Ghostbusters for the 50th time. In that respect at least, I was sane. Because problem Number Three with the modern wedding is The Hen Night.
3) HEN NIGHTS. What was, 20 years ago, simply a night in the pub, but with extra-raucous screaming – sum expenditure: £30 on Baileys – now involves a huge swathe of time and money from those unfortunate and loyal enough to be bridesmaids.
Caz has borne the bad end of 21st-century hen nights. For despite being the world’s most reluctant wedding guest, capricious, Beadle-like gods have made her be Chief Bridesmaid no less than four times. On one occasion, she got so tanked she gatecrashed the groom’s stag night, to tell him she thought he was gay. On another hen night, the bride’s insistence that all the attendees wear matching ‘Team Ciara’ sateen tour jackets led to a size 16 bridesmaid having a body dysmorphia-induced panic attack at a roller disco, and getting a taxi home from London to Stevenage, hysterically hyperventilating. There was also the hen night where a ‘bonding’ walk in the Yorkshire Dales ended up in Caz having to scramble down a 50- foot scree after a buggy that someone was slightly too pissed to be responsibly in charge of; but we all agreed later that that could have happened to anyone.
4) ‘EVERYONE I LOVE IS HERE.’ Do you really want ‘all the people you love’ in one room, together? It rarely works out well. I, for instance, am very bad with other people’s families. At one wedding – where I was the best man – I heard the bride’s mother was a huge Richard Madeley fan, and, in my cups, regaled her with my best Richard Madeley anecdote: that his favourite swearword was ‘fuckadoodle’.
How to Be a Woman Page 17
