[BITList] Off Topic - Jill and Kev's Wedding Dance now up to 15Million Views.

[HUGH]

John,

I know I'm a curmudgeon, and old enough to have forgotten whatever it is one is supposed to have forgotten at my age (a thousand e-mail's on the symptoms of being over 60 can't be wrong), but when did weddings cease to be just that, sodding weddings? They are, when one gets down to it (and I don't think that's a pun, not consciously, anyway), simply the least one can do to be classed as married.  Some years ago we watched (from across the road), the wedding of that and any other year.  A hundred yards of lace, more top hats than Fred Astaire had in his wardrobe, and a coach and four to transport the happy couple into bliss. It lasted 6 months.  The gods don't like ostentation.  What they think of trendiness I am not qualified to say, but it fair maks me grue.  I define trendiness as anything that tends to extend a wedding ceremony (church or civil) past the legal or religious requirements.  In particular I hate it when a couple sing to each other or recite bloody poems about how they met.  I mean, who gves a shit !  Get on with it and let's have a dance.  I was at a wedding where some obscure uncle of the bride got onto his feet amid the standard speeches (chair, groom, best man, sit down) and mumbled interminably about this and that.  The chap sitting beside me was fit to be tied. My brother-in-law's niece got married in the USA. Her father paid for the wedding, despite being divorced from her mother. We watched the video. There was a lectern complete with microphone and light.  A stream of people walked up and talked rubbish at the reception. The bride herself brought a sheaf of notes to it, put on her specs, and gave a lecture, thanking all bar Dad.  The only thing missing was a dance down the aisle.  At a family wedding we attended the chef was seen brandishing a cleaver and threatening to use it if all the extraneous crap taking place didn't cease before the dinner was ruined.  In the runup to our elder daughter's wedding (Susan and Kev !) I gave the best man a course entitled The Duties of a Best Man.  Until then he'd thought his only role was to tell bad jokes about Kev in lieu of a speech. Au contraire, I told him, in an ideal world you'd be limited to one joke as long as it was funny, but that aside, you will liaise with the hotel manageress re progress of the dinner, etc, and you will disabuse any photographers of the notion that the whole affair was set up just for photos to be taken ad infinitum.  And I wrote his speech for him after he gave up on it - he supplied the jokes. So, the dinner was only a little late, and the whole went very well indeed.

Hugh.
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