Old, New, Borrowed, Blue


W


E MARRIED off Daughter Number One recently - so that’s one free bed in the house and one less mouth to feed. Or it would be if the ways of marriage hadn’t changed totally. The new Mrs hasn’t actually lived with us for 20 years and has already been co-habiting with the new Mr longer than some modern marriages last… long enough to have started a family.


That litle detail was a social faux pas forty years ago when I first walked up the aisle, cause for whispers behind the hand and knowing references to the evils of rock music and those Rolling Stones. Today baby is part of the family photo and burbles happily on the floor as solemn pledges of loyalty are exchanged.


Couples today are oſten twice the age I was when they – if they – make vows. Instead of me as a skinny 21-year-old with a mop of hair and a Burton’s suit, today’s grooms and brides are likely to have done university, career and full- blown lifestyle experience to become rounded adults before setling down. Even the most fertile childbearing years will have passed them by – hence the boom in fertility treatments.


Boy, were we raw in 1972…£50 overdrawn, rushing to rent a house, borrowing dad’s Triumph Herald for the weekend honeymoon. The bride’s clothes were handmade, our reception a plain meal in a hotel. So plain my dad paid a fiddler in the bar to come through to the lounge to provide some music (I forgot).


We had next to nothing to start a home with so I bought carpet a workmate was throwing out having convinced the new lady of my house it was seventies’ brown. In the light it turned out to be orange. My in-laws helped us paint the rooms and we got a second hand twin tub washing machine which I made look cool by covering it in green spoted Formica. DIY, you see…all the rage.


I’ve married twice, both times in sight of God. What a hypocrite. I’m a raging


10 February 2016


atheist and shouldn’t be allowed to darken the door but then from an evangelical perspective I’m living proof of the seven deadly sins. It used to be what every respectable family expected, a church wedding. Clergy, hymns, organ, blessings and unforgiving pews all embraced in your Sunday best. By way of contrast a registry do was a grim affair usually conducted in an anonymous office coated with municipal emulsion, devoid of adornment or virginal white ribbon and stripped of social cache…just a bit furtive.


The bride’s clothes were handmade, our reception a plain meal in a hotel.


Wedding in 1972. Pic Credit KUCO


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