wedding madness

Sitting by the pool again - this time the butterflies in the lavender beside me are delicate orange with black and grey lines and spots - beautiful. Because Wayson Choy's symbol for many years was a butterfly, every time one hovers near, I'm sure it is Wayson, checking to see if I'm at work.

I did get some work done yesterday in my tranquil gite, before leaving for Chaosland. where more people are arriving all the time, and also, yesterday, a hundred chairs, glasses, plates and a convoy of tables for Saturday. The bride and her sister went to have a spray tan and both returned coloured blue; apparently this is normal and it fades to a glowing brown, but last night at dinner, when Lynn was compiling the nationalities in her family - Scottish-Canadian, French, Burundian, Australian, Mauritian, Guadeloupian and El Salvadorian - her daughter Sarah added, "And we also have two Smurfs."

The dinner was for the groom's Australian mother and two of her friends, and it went smashingly - though preparing the dinner was a frantic process, once the three gigots d'agneau and the ton of barbequed potatoes were on the table, all the kitchen staff (Norah, Karen, Beth) relaxed, knowing the salads were ready, the cheeses and bread, the ice cream. Lynn is a relaxed person and Judy is a relaxed person; the two of them were soon chatting like old friends. Greg, the groom, looked as if he would rather be anywhere else in the world - confiding to me earlier that he was terrified of all this wedding hooha and if he'd known what awaited, he might not have proposed.

I pointed out that of his two fellow sons-in-law, one had waited until the last possible moment to arrive from Mauritius (late today) and the other, Jean-Marie from Burundi, has vanished to do some business somewhere in France, also to return at the last minute. So poor Greg is on his own, dealing with decisions about music, ribbons, flowers, table settings, hair styles, and whether his wife's face will be brown or blue by wedding-time tomorrow.

I told the multitudes at the table that my ex-husband and I had avoided all this exhausting organising by doing things in a different order: we had a honeymoon first, then we had a baby, then we got married, and then, three months later, we had a huge day-long party for all our friends. So there was no pressure about the ceremony. As my dad said that day, "Usually at weddings we make a wish for the fertility of the young couple, but in this case, that's already taken care of." The only drawback was having to find a wedding dress that allowed breast-feeding.

I also told Greg that we are all here not just to celebrate him and Jessica, this specific young couple, but because weddings are important for everyone. We all want to be part of a joyful confirmation of love and a commitment to the future. Even for those of us for whom marriage did not work out, the sight of two twenty-year olds in love taking vows is a moving and marvellous thing.

This bitter old crone wanted to say, this wedding part is easy, Greg. The hard part is the next seventy years. But she didn't.