Wedding Fever

In times gone by, there were but two choices of wedding venue in the UK. The God fearing opted for a Church and for the rest, unless you lived near the fantastic Chelsea registry office, you had to traipse to the local town hall and sit on orange plastic chairs awaiting a 20 minute slot with a sour-faced civil servant.

Not any more! For the last twenty years or so, despite the 120,000 divorces each year, 400,000 happy British hopefuls clamour to pledge their troths in splendid surroundings. The UK boasts a fine array of approved wedding venues, ranging from stately homes, via pubs to pods on the London Eye.

Frequenting a hotel the other week, my friend and I noticed that the front wall was bedecked with a festive banner announcing ‘Wedding for a Grand’. Being poetic souls, we suggested to the manager that ‘Take her hand for a grand’ might be a catchier slogan. He wasn’t impressed. A hotel manager’s health and safety worries coupled with a coach load of pensioners staggering up the steps for lunch, trumped our fascination with literary hoardings. Never mind, we concluded, with an average ‘wedding day’ costing £13,000, it sounded like a bargain, notwithstanding the lack of literary finesse.

 

With our minds on matters matrimonial, we ventured into the city. There was no shortage at all of festivity to witness. Within the space of an hour, we counted no fewer than four troth-pledgings. We categorised each according to its most striking characteristics. First was the ‘fascinating wedding’. Every lady spilling onto the pavement from the matrimonial hostelry had emulated Sam-Cam’s remarkably fascinating royal wedding headgear. Then there was the ‘orange wedding’. Bereft of marching Rangers supporters but packed with the tango-coloured tanned, it was a sight to behold. Next there was the 'kilt wedding'. We lingered there for quite some time to survey the Scottish delights on offer.   
 
When we returned, a little light headed, to the hotel in the early evening, the disco was in full swing. Gone however was the ‘Wedding for a Grand’ banner.
       ‘That’s great,’ remarked my friend, ‘he’s going to change it to “take her hand for a grand,” like we recommended, after all.’
The manager was quick to intervene and quash our hopes.
        ‘We always take it down when the wedding party arrives,’ he pointed out, ‘people don’t want their guests thinking they’ve sold them short.’