Читать книгу William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story - Matt Rudd - Страница 8

1 The vows. Don’t shout them, don’t whimper them, don’t faint during them. Easy.

2 The speech. Thank everyone—but mainly in-laws, look happy, declare love for new wife and make bridesmaids cry. Had to follow Isabel’s father, who did ten minutes on the traumas of her breech birth and made two members of the audience physically sick. Did fine, though, compared to Andy. I’d chosen him as best man over Johnson because he worked in the diplomatic corps and I’d remembered those Ferrero Rocher ads. As Isabel pointed out, he wasn’t actually an ambassador but doesn’t everyone in the diplomatic corps have tact? No, nerves destroyed his judgement and he never recovered from his choice of opener (‘What’s the difference between a bridegroom and a cucumber?’). His attempt to regain momentum involved raising all three topics he’d specifically been told not to (my scatological university tragedy, the vastly differing weights of the bridesmaids and my Hyde Park Corner fling with a floozy). It wasn’t pretty.

3 The dance. Two lessons hadn’t been enough to master the foxtrot. Isabel’s toe crushed in the first verse of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and an elephantine triple-trampling in the second. I considered stopping in the third to summon a paramedic or podiatric specialist but she blinked away the tears, squeezed my shoulder very, very hard and whispered, ‘Keep going.’ I did, we finished with a twirl, great aunties sighed, friends said how beautiful we looked and I decided to take that at face value.

4 The consummation. Bridesmaids always ask the bride if you did or you didn’t. If you didn’t, they tell their boyfriends and husbands. Who tell all their friends. Who all snigger. So, despite fatigue and room spin and a frankly terrifying corset, we did.

Now it’s Sunday and we can relax for the first time in six months.

Lunch was fun. No ribbons or corsages or speeches or Windsor knots or place mats or chauffeurs or confetti or wish-they-hadn’t-come extended family. Just thirty of us at a pizza restaurant in Highgate going over the post-nuptial-mortem.