Weekend Wedding

We’ve withstood the first test – a weekend of travel away. Instead of ending up at each other’s throats with knives, daggers and over-companied irritation, by this morning my guy and I were at each other’s throats in that sickly sweet soft-porn way.

I didn’t catch the bouquet. Didn’t want to. But also… I was under strict orders to ensure that another girl had it blatantly flung into her arms – as maybe if she catches it for the 3rd time in a row her boyfriend will catch the now-glaring-hint. But with as much purpose as she took the flowers, her boyfriend took the chance to not be around to notice or realise.

Some old white haired man hobbled past me & the boyf. still early into the evening & laid his prediction down that we will one day be the newly-hitched awed-at couple. A wise old oracle man in our midsts?! Or, rather I reckon, that he hit the whiskey earlier than the rest of us.

Then in a display that this might all be more serious than jovial me ever reckons… the boyf. and I took a R100 bet on whether we will get married. If we do, it will be me, the bride, who will have to hand over the blue Rand bill.

So the last of the season’s weddings was good fun. The bride & us ‘maids were barefoot for most of the night – from traipsing down a red carpet onto the drizzling beach setting, the shortest most-amusing ceremony known to man - given by a best friend of the groom, tasty food and all running smoothly in that way where nothing really does run smoothly.

This was my first wedding attendance where I was coupled. And boy, what a parallel world it is! I even finally cracked the nod to sit at the “couple table”!! [They drink FAR less than the singles’ table. Which just mean all the more wine for me!] I ended up spending most of the time in my guy’s company rather than hooligan dancing with the other crazy strangers-till-the-first-tequilas singles. No shaking one’s hips & ass out of the clutches of the dodgy single male guests while twirling towards the cute single guys. No getting to know 3/4s of wedding attendees through tipsy jabbering. At one stage I stopped and realised that this was the most bizarre of all moments… being more than content there in the arms of my guy, watching the wedding go past, rather than helping it along its over-merry way.

It ended me with lying on the bedroom floor pulling 1001 pins and clips from my “hairdo” and vowing that I will be handing the boyf that R100 in a Vegas chapel – cause all this admin and tradition and “nuances” of individual weddings just ain’t worth the stress!

So from West Coast America, to Jo’burg North, searching out Church names in Soweto, to the deck of a where-I-grew-up beach house, with a stint amongst the Stellenbosch vineyards, and finally ending barefoot (no damn gold shoes actually necessary!!) in a Eastern Cape beach pub – so ends Wedding Season 2007/08.