Ritual Slice

Today

Becky and I are steadily working through what's needed to organise her wedding day later this year. Once this particular machine gets started, there are a number of assumptions made about the rituals surrounding it. People talk about bouquets, veils, bridesmaids, speeches and matching waistcoats as though the marriage couldn't be solemnised without these things.

One thing that we are unsure about is the value of a wedding cake. At many of the recent weddings that I have attended, the cake-cutting has been a sort of non-event, its significance rather lost. People are less fond of fruit cake than they used to be, but other sorts of cake don't keep too well, so that sending a piece to Auntie in Canada isn't an option. And to make a pile of cupcakes seems to be missing the point.

So, right now, wedding cake may be off the agenda.

In My Day

My wedding day has been the subject of this blog before, but planning Becky's has caused me to think about how small our expectations were when we got married. Getting to the register office was challenging enough. We hoped that our very nearest and dearest would be able to make it and were not at all put out by the unexpected addition of Keir and his family. The little feast we'd prepared was just stretched to include them. I think that there were about twenty people at our wedding.

But we did have a cake. This was a complete surprise. Paul's mother had made it, probably using her infamous "bung-in" recipe and his dad had done a magnificent job of icing it.

Since we had given everyone less than two weeks' notice of our impending nuptials, this was indeed an achievement and was accepted as a gift of the most loving kind. Looking at that picture makes me wonder what kind of knife we were using. Certainly not a proper cake knife.

What with the champagne that Chris supplied and the flowers both families brought (sweets peas, all of them - how weird is that?) we managed to fit in a number of rituals into our impromptu wedding.

And the marriage has been none the worse for that.