Everyone is getting married this year. By everyone I mean two of my friends and one of my sisters, but that's enough people I know for me to feel like I've not really been concentrating on what's going on. Me and my friends were 15 years old a few days ago and, as far as I was aware, my sister was 8. But in 2013 they're all suddenly being joined in holy matrimony. To different people, I mean, not the three of them to each other like members of a cult.
Friends and family getting married means responsibilities and considerations. I can't just turn up for the after-party or wake or whatever it's called and steadily get drunk enough to ruin everything; I have to do stuff. In the case of one of the friend-weddings I've actually been designated best man, which shows a tremendous amount of trust and an even more tremendous lack of foresight on the part of the friend getting hitched.
The first major hurdle is suits. Myself and the groom have to wear matching suits because tradition dictates that the bride must be confused like a rube in one of those swindle games where they ask you to keep your eye on a card as they're all shuffled around for you to find it. "Oh no, which one is he?!" What makes this complicated is that the groom and I are from very different physical moulds - he's just over 9 feet tall, whereas I'm barely 4. It's going to look like a wizard and his hobbit, particularly since the suit is brown with coat-tails, adding heavily to my Shirefolk aspect. I still have to get measured for this suit too, having to get it carefully cut due to my Tom Cruisian stature, which means standing in the musty atmosphere of Dyfed Menswear with an old man using a measuring tape as an excuse to brush his knuckles against my balls. Just a little bit.
There's also a stag night to arrange. Between myself and the groom we have a total of one friend, so there's little potential for a wild time with this...
Everyone is getting married this year. By everyone I mean two of my friends and one of my sisters, but that's enough people I know for me to feel like I've not really been concentrating on what's going on. Me and my friends were 15 years old a few days ago and, as far as I was aware, my sister was 8. But in 2013 they're all suddenly being joined in holy matrimony. To different people, I mean, not the three of them to each other like members of a cult.
Friends and family getting married means responsibilities and considerations. I can't just turn up for the after-party or wake or whatever it's called and steadily get drunk enough to ruin everything; I have to do stuff. In the case of one of the friend-weddings I've actually been designated best man, which shows a tremendous amount of trust and an even more tremendous lack of foresight on the part of the friend getting hitched.
The first major hurdle is suits. Myself and the groom have to wear matching suits because tradition dictates that the bride must be confused like a rube in one of those swindle games where they ask you to keep your eye on a card as they're all shuffled around for you to find it. "Oh no, which one is he?!" What makes this complicated is that the groom and I are from very different physical moulds - he's just over 9 feet tall, whereas I'm barely 4. It's going to look like a wizard and his hobbit, particularly since the suit is brown with coat-tails, adding heavily to my Shirefolk aspect. I still have to get measured for this suit too, having to get it carefully cut due to my Tom Cruisian stature, which means standing in the musty atmosphere of Dyfed Menswear with an old man using a measuring tape as an excuse to brush his knuckles against my balls. Just a little bit.
There's also a stag night to arrange. Between myself and the groom we have a total of one friend, so there's little potential for a wild time with this one unless I really try and pull out all the stops. I just have no idea how. There must be a website out there where you can rent Lads who turn up in sports-related polo shirts and stonewashed jeans with fake paint-splatters on them. You get on a bus with them and they accompany you to Swansea, drinking WKD and going "WAAAAAAYYYY" a lot, and the night ends with the groom being shaved completely hairless from head to toe and sellotaped to a church spire. If there isn't some disaster, if blurry iPhone footage of the groom shagging a dwarf isn't on PornoTube by morning, you get a discount. This is the kind of story about his stag party I'm supposed to be able to proudly tell people years from now, rather than "we sat around playing wrestling games on my old Nintendo 64, drinking Carlsberg and getting nostalgic about the dial-up noise computers used to make."
Perhaps the biggest concern for me, and this wedding is all about me, is the best man's speech. Speech? Holy shit. I have to make a speech. I could knock something out in five minutes if I was only going to deliver it to him, but there are other people involved. Lots of other people, many of whom I've never met. You can't be a niche, elitist Stewart Lee at a wedding attended by ruddy-faced, hard-working welsh people - you have to be a warm and universal Bob Monkhouse. This means I have to temper my usual urges to talk up our bromance and acknowledge the fact that it's not me he's marrying, but an actual woman. I also have to think up a nice way of saying that I'm frankly amazed he's found one willing to deal with him for the rest of her natural life. In fact, do I even make any jokes? A lot of people take weddings very seriously, often attending specifically to cry. Do I make it really serious and meaningful? All wistful, poetic prose about the rising and setting of the sun, the swift and thoughtless flow of time, the swelling sentimentality that comes with advancing years as people settle down and invest their time in teaching the next generation what it means to truly live. Or can I just talk about COCKS?
Similarly, I must scribble down something for my sister's wedding too. Thankfully I don't have to read that one out myself, so there's no need for me to stand in front of a judgemental room in a rented suit that doesn't fit quite right and spew my own overwritten wankery for their acidic assessment. Someone else can secrete my mouthfuls to the masses and if it all goes arse-shaped I'll shirk all responsibility and let them take the fall. The third wedding, later in the year, holds no special tasks for me at all other than turning up and looking sharp and not shouting out "I LOVE HIM" when it gets to the part where anyone can air their objections. I don't have objections, I have Tourette's.
How all these people can afford to get married I have no idea. Everything costs a lot of money. If a sandwich from an M&S at Cardiff central station is £4 (not even part of a meal deal or nothin'), then I can't even begin to imagine how much a whole ceremony about how you're going to put up with each other and each others' awful friends and family until one of you dies or kills their spouse costs. At this point I'm fairly sure a wedding runs somewhere in the region of a tidy £1 million, with suits, dresses, venues, photography, food, transportation, police surveillance, armed guards, psychiatric care and a honeymoon on Europa or wherever they go. Where is this money coming from? Is there a wedding fund that I haven't been told about or do you just accept it as part of being a grown-up? That at some point you're going to hold hands and jump into a great big pool of debt like a pair of destitute, denial-plagued Scrooge McDucks, just so that everyone knows you're willing to even hold hands at all?
Responsibilities and badly bruised bank balances aside, I am quite looking forward to these weddings. At their core - the actual brides and grooms - they're weddings between fun people who don't take things very seriously. The bride and groom are the most important people there on the day, and if they're fun to be around, as all six of this lot are, then that day has a lot of potential to be a good one. Particularly since we're all still overgrown kids pretending to know what the hell we're doing.
Friends and family getting married means responsibilities and considerations. I can't just turn up for the after-party or wake or whatever it's called and steadily get drunk enough to ruin everything; I have to do stuff. In the case of one of the friend-weddings I've actually been designated best man, which shows a tremendous amount of trust and an even more tremendous lack of foresight on the part of the friend getting hitched.
The first major hurdle is suits. Myself and the groom have to wear matching suits because tradition dictates that the bride must be confused like a rube in one of those swindle games where they ask you to keep your eye on a card as they're all shuffled around for you to find it. "Oh no, which one is he?!" What makes this complicated is that the groom and I are from very different physical moulds - he's just over 9 feet tall, whereas I'm barely 4. It's going to look like a wizard and his hobbit, particularly since the suit is brown with coat-tails, adding heavily to my Shirefolk aspect. I still have to get measured for this suit too, having to get it carefully cut due to my Tom Cruisian stature, which means standing in the musty atmosphere of Dyfed Menswear with an old man using a measuring tape as an excuse to brush his knuckles against my balls. Just a little bit.
There's also a stag night to arrange. Between myself and the groom we have a total of one friend, so there's little potential for a wild time with this...