Let me start by confessing that the above isn’t entirely true. Not that I didn’t cry at the wedding, of course I did, loudly and embarrassingly, but I also drank and danced and ate some dinner and was in some photos and got to wear a pretty dress and gorgeous shoes, and see two of my best friends become Mr and Mrs Elliott – so there were lots of nice things to make that mammoth journey worthwhile beyond the sniffling. In fact, to some extent the wedding doubled up as a nice little ‘welcome home’ party for me. Not that the bride and groom probably saw it that way, but…. So many awesome people that I wanted to catch up with anyway came to see the nuptials that it actually saved me a lot of effort. I got to drink and chat and dance to my heart’s content with lots of lovely friends without tearing up and down the country – I just went to the wedding venue and they all came to me. Very nicely scrubbed up as well most them, with tattoos away and ties on there were some I barely recognised as my friends. That is until the bar ran out of beer and everyone seemed to have said ties on their heads…. Then it was pretty clear that I did in fact know these people.
Of course being a bridesmaid involves a lot more than just the wedding day itself, there was a hilarious and messy hen night to contend with, which involved a lot of cocktails and random dares, a very tall man, a very short man, drunk and drunker in mini skirts and a stranger called Sanjay who I managed to convince was a long lost mate. Needless to say it was a night which left us all somewhat broken and hungover (and some of us clutching kebabs, but for once not me). Then there was the night before the wedding which I got to spend at home with the bride to be (who embarrassingly for her decided to wear a onesie! Sorry Su…) and the other lovely bridesmaid Jadey. As ‘bridesmaid-in-charge-of-alcohol’ this was my time to shine, and shine I did. I also proclaimed myself ‘bridesmaid-in-charge-of-making-sure-nobody-cries’ and proceeded to cry about 35 seconds after making that announcement, prompted by a totally soppy card and a beautiful pair of shoes. Ho hum. By the time the following morning rolled around and everyone was fussing with hair and makeup and dresses and speeches I’d given up on the ‘no crying on my watch’ and was mainly trying to ensure that everyone involved had ingested enough alcohol for 11am – I feel that I was much better suited to that role.
In the run up to the wedding I had a little outing to the dress shop with Su to collect our dresses – a fairly traditional bridesmaidly duty I suppose. What was probably slightly less traditional was the day I spent with the groom visiting such glamorous locations as Currys, Office World, Coventry University and then finally the rehearsal studio where we proceeded to load an entire PA system into the back of the car. Bearing in mind this was the day before the wedding and I’d already had a very expensive and delicate manicure, complete with sparkly diamantes, I was now basically reduced (or some would say promoted!) to a roadie. A roadie with very pretty nails at least. Still, as prosaic and ordinary as all of that sounds it was actually one of my favourite times surrounding the wedding. Having been away for over a year it was the first time in a long time that I got to spend some time with Gra. Speeding us around the Midlands in his brother-in-law’s car he was a captive audience – I talked at him about all of kinds of subjects, we had a small deep and meaningful and we laughed a lot. And we played a lot of music – all of the bands that we loved as teenagers which made us become friends in the first place. Despite being 31 years old and one of us about to get married (the very definition of a grown up in my book) for a few hours we were back to being 2 awkward teenagers immersing ourselves in pop punk.
So, through the title of this post I intrigued you with mention of broken teeth and split trousers. I promise you there were both. I’ll start with the tooth, as that was actually mine. Broken at the wedding but not, as sooo many people assumed (thanks guys!) in a drunken fall but on a particularly vicious piece of crackling. The worst thing about this story? It wasn’t even my own crackling. Having eaten mine (delicious!) I noticed that some of the Elliot’s at the table weren’t eating theirs. So I did a bit of crackling minesweeping. If ever there was a cautionary tale about not being greedy and stealing other people’s food this was it. I was really self-conscious of my missing piece of front tooth for the rest of the day and couldn’t stop fretting about it. Someone (I think it may well have been Rich) advised me to ‘drink through’ my self-consciousness and I would soon forget that there was a tooth-related issue at all. To be fair that actually worked, although the next day it was still missing, and I had a sore head to top it off, so a phonecall to the emergency dentist was on the cards. Not really where I wanted to spend time on my trip home (my dentist surprisingly wasn’t on the list of people I wanted to catch up with) but it had to be done. The only other option would have been to embrace the gyppo look and get a dog on a string, but the dog would have had problems at the border I think.
As least I had the good fortune to break my tooth after we had already had the official photographs. Not so with the split trousers. These actually belonged to the best man, who thought he could get in a quick game of table tennis between the ceremony and the pictures (what were you thinking Androo?!) and somehow, presumably on taking a very athletic shot, split the seam of his suit trousers right up the arse. Luckily Jadey produced a sewing kit from somewhere, but as I can’t sew for toffee despite being an ex-Girl Guide, I had to call upon Gra’s Mum to do the honors. This was how, while the ushers were running around trying to gather people together for the photographs, they happened to find 2 bridesmaids, the mother of the groom and the best man in his underpants all hiding in a side room of the venue. Small bit awkward. Fortunately I managed to get a photograph of a very sad looking Androo in his pants, which was the most requested photograph on Facebook in the days following the wedding! It was also the only photograph on my iPhone from the entire day but I feel like it was a good one.
Having made it safely back to Sydney and gotten over my jetlag would I travel over 10,000 miles to be bridesmaid again? Yep, absolutely. For my investment of time, effort and money for a plane ticket I was rewarded with about 10,000 smiles, 8,000 in-jokes, at least 5,000 drinks, 250 hugs, 100 lovely meals, 15 sing-alongs, 6 totes emosh little cries, 2 lovely newlyweds and 1 pair of seriously beautiful shoes. Felt like a good deal to me.
