I Do, I Do, I Do

On Saturday, my good friend C got married, in Wales, at Llansteadffread Court. We all traipsed out to the countryside from London, where, as the poem I read says (Wordsworth The Prelude) we were "free/free as a bird to wonder where I will." The setting was fabulous - very Jane Austen, complete with water feature, haha, cows, misty mountains, and small churchyard (and devastating graveyard in which one family lost FOUR children in the same month - January 1836). Autumn is more advanced out there as well, and there were proper big huge shiny conkers around. P, C's brother, has finally cut his hair and shaved off his sideburns and looks about a 1,000 times better. He became my pseudo other half for the duration, as I had thought would happen, as we were one of very few people who had not a significant other to bring.
Weddings are funny things though, aren't they? C is into her alternative, bohemian thing (charity shop shopping, non-matching plates, composting) and wanted her wedding to be as laidback and informal as possible. It was lovely, but in the end, fairly traditional: I don't think there is anyway these things can escape tradition. I used to think maybe you could reinvent the tradition from within but now I am more hardcore and don't really see how you can reconcile feminist consciousness with marriage. When P complained to me that he was fed up with people asking him when he it was going to be his turn, I told him he should tell them it was a bourgeois instrument of patriarchal oppression that he refuses to perpetuate. His 2nd cousin, a particularly haughty blonde girl said "yeah, and everyone would just think you were sad, and no-one would know what you mean!"Then P pointed out at least you would know who you were going to spend New Year with. So this is what the argument for marriage has boiled down to: not looking sad to silly blonde girls, and not feeling lonely on 31st December. Having said that, once she'd got over her terrible nerves and anxiety, (she hadn't slept for over a week worrying about it!) C looked incredibly happy. I really wish her all the best.