Weddings, funerals and shared jeans

Today would have been my parents' sixtieth wedding anniversary, a diamond jubilee to rival that of the other eighty-something female that my mother bears, some would say, a striking resemblance to, if only my father could have been bothered to wait around for it instead of casting off the shackles of his mortality in some Godless and anonymous hospital bed all those years ago. (Sorry Da, but I told you to wait until you received my permission to go and you did not; you deserve my ire, as feigned as it is.) It is on a day such as today that I miss not getting, or being, married; there is something about a wedding, a proper wedding, Mendelssohn's Wedding March by the local Youth Orchestra, although that from Wagner's Lohengrin on a pipe organ is probably more usual, long trains of satin and tulle, morning suits with tails and cravats, hats fit to grace Ascot, a vintage Rolls Royce in white, that must make every wedding anniversary a day to remember; a day carved indelibly in memory of an occasion like no other. Naturally, it is highly hypocritical of me to occasionally hanker after a traditional church wedding with its attendant religious pomposity and avowed commitment before a nameless and faceless God, but, nonetheless I do.

Of course, this is a view of an event seen through spectacles so rose-tinted as to be almost opaque and I have no doubt that the sheen is somewhat tarnished by what seems now to be the inevitable 'messy divorce', alimony and single parents, not to mention fathers rationed and circumscribed in their exposure to their children's day to day existence; their first words, their first foray into that unknown territory of the 'potty', the day when the stabilisers were finally removed from the bicycle for ever or, worse still, a loveless marriage in which the only thing in common is a desire to maintain a nuclear family for 'the sake of the children' and which does little or nothing for their emotional well-being or development.

Although I have never experienced such a wedding, 'in the round', so to speak, with all of its trauma, worry, financial cost and joy, I have attended a few as an innocent bystander and I have always been struck by how much happier the couple seem to be at a church wedding than at a civil ceremony without all that 'pomp and circumstance'. For some reason, and it may be just my selective vision, a church wedding, which seems to me a potentially more solemn and formal affair, always attracts a sense of the 'happy couple' sharing a 'private joke' which, nonetheless, is infectious enough to contaminate the entire church; in my experience, I have not witnessed this in a civil ceremony. Perhaps it is merely to be put down to the 'sense of occasion' which civil ceremonies are somehow lacking.

In a society which becomes increasingly more mobile and less family based, weddings are often the rare event when all of the members of a family come together, if only for a brief while, as fractious though it might be, and only funerals command the same devotion to attendance. (The only time that I ever remember seeing my father's youngest sister was at my niece's wedding.) However, no-one takes photographs at a funeral unless it is a shot of the flowers piled high along the graveside. As keen a photographer as I am, even I had no inclination to take pictures of the hearse or the funeral director who, in the UK, walks before the hearse for the first two hundred yards or thereabouts so that the local community has time to gather on the pavement to pay their last respects to the departed. Weddings are not only renowned for the rare employment of a professional photographer and the vast quantities of images that he or she produces but everyone else has a camera and the number of pictures rises exponentially until there is not a single undocumented second to the whole event.

While I suspect that there is a certain vicarious thrill to looking at other people's wedding photographs, I seldom do it unless the photographs are old, more than twenty years old and I was present, or at least should have been present. I find it endlessly fascinating to try and remember all those faces which comprise the ubiquitous 'group shot' and try to pin names to them; those that have passed on; those that you saw just the once; the ex-girlfriends and partners; the small children now grown into adults with children of their own.

Yes, on the whole, I really should have done it once instead of just opting for joint bank accounts, joint mortgages, shared jeans and T-shirts or a lien on my record collection.