Thank the little baby Jesus fucking Christ I don’t have Sky at home. I’ve been happily engaged to be married to my true love for a little over two days, and already I’m choked to the eyeballs on wedding television. There are actually entire channels (yes plural) devoted to programmes about two people saying ‘I do’ in endlessly slight variations of the same event. Everyone thinks their wedding is unique and special, and to them it is, but to anyone looking at the sky they are all the same. It’s like the so-called races of humanity: all have minor superficial differences, but remember to focus on more important things and under the surface the genetic differences are amazingly insignificant.
Seemingly, as with weddings. Some people get married in a building, some in a slightly different kind of building, others not in a building but near a building or in a temporary structure. Some people exchange small rings of precious metal which they wear as ornamentation on their left hand; actually they all do that. Some women wear a long white dress; some wear a slightly shorter ivory coloured dress. For some entirely inexplicable reason, possibly to do with a childhood bump on the head, some people choose to have their wedding filmed for a low budget TV show, and have arbitrary restrictions put on the planning of their special day.
Filling my soon-to-be in-laws Sky+ box is a programme called Don’t Tell The Bride in which the bride is kept alone and isolated for the month before her wedding and the groom is given £12,000 and told to sort the whole fucking lot out by himself. Mostly they give it a good shot but inevitably, being the drooling impulsive cock-lead button-pushing obsessive tit-watchers that we all are, they have at least one fit of mania. Like trying to design the dress by themselves, or moving the best man into the house and imbibing nothing but beer and Dominos for a month, or gambling most of the money away, or buying expensive plane tickets to Las Vegas and using the last bag of pennies to pay for the rest of the wedding. Some of these ideas are not so disastrous, but others can and do fry the brains of their poor wing-clipped brides.
Now I am engaged I am duty bound to sit still and shut up while women I barely know attempt to enforce random traditions that they can only explain with the words ‘that’s the way it always is’. Apparently wedding invitations are supposed to be sent out by and from the bride’s parents, not actually saying the names of the wedding couple on them. Well not on my watch. This clearly makes no sense and simple tradition cannot be used to justify or explain something that clumsy and unnecessary. In many parts of the world it’s tradition to mutilate the genitals of baby girls, but somehow tradition cannot adequately justify this abomination. The point I just failed to make there, with that ugly, unnecessary and imbalanced image was just that tradition is not a good enough reason to do something. If a tradition is harmless and fun it might be nice to do it, but if you can think of a better way to do it, do it your own way. Other times traditions might be actively annoying, stupid or harmful in which case it might be a good idea to give it a miss.
And we haven’t even started with the debacle of explaining our secular wedding to my fiancée’s elderly Irish Catholic relatives yet...
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