Posturing

Another Ackland Street moment ... shoppers and tourists paused to check out the young bride and her groom dodging the trams to get to the other side of the road. She was decked out in the full pavlova - full, white and frothy, with bare shoulders. It took me a second or two work out what was so jarringly wrong with her look. She couldn't stand up straight or walk properly.
The poor girl had almost certainly spent much time, energy and dosh on sourcing the frock for her Big Day, but apparently no one had told her that her efforts would come to naught if she couldn't sharpen up her posture. So here she was, stomping down the street, neck first, shoulders rounded, looking, in spite of the fairytale dress, like she was about to dig spuds.  
It takes one to know one. When I started grammar school aged 11, I was swiftly diagnosed with round shoulders, told to miss assembly every Wednesday and go instead to the gym. Here were gathered the halt and lame. The flat-footed edged their way along floor's white lines, curling one foot at a time; the stooped had their shoulders briskly pulled back to their "proper" position by the nurse and spent the time it took for a hymn, a prayer and various announcements, promenading the perimeter to the accompaniment of stirring band music.
You can imagine how helpful this was for improving my posture. Which, I realised years later, was almost entirely due to crippling lack of confidence and large shoulder blades. That well-meaning nurse would have achieved better results by sitting me down and talking to me. I might, if I trusted her, have confessed that there was no way on god's green earth I was going to stand or walk chest first, because I didn't have one, and the best way to disguise this shameful condition was to hunch and keep my head down.
I didn't come of age, posture-wise, for several more decades. One day, I realised it had corrected itself, that I now stood and walked tall because I felt I deserved to. And my big shoulder blades fell naturally into place. Pilates helped. And so has tango.
So, there's a market niche here - teaching prospective brides how to stand and walk in order to carry off that glamourous gown.

So anyway ...

Back to the recent nuptials.

As you can see, the groom was unconventionally attired, although not as underdressed as he'd threatened to be several months before, when cut-off jeans and jandals were mentioned. He wore this fine, pale-gray Zara item - known officially as the Wedding Cardie - a new white teeshirt, his best jeans and new white trainers.

To my great admiration, the bride was more than happy to let him go his own way, although she had other ideas for herself and wore white. But let me hasten to add that she looked nothing like a meringue, let alone one of the type's lime-green variations, several examples of which we spied in shop windows in Kunming and Hanoi, before flinching and scuttling past.

S had asked her friend and maid-of-honour Winsome to make her a dress. Winsome has a design shop in Kunming, and her tailoring is knock-out perfect. When I was there in January she fitted me for and made - in a few short days - a beautifully constructed little black jacket. Her design for S was a perfectly plain, strapless, fitted sheath in crisp stretchy cotton. With it, S wore pale satin high-heeled sandals, a short veil she'd bought online, her mother's pearls and a few white lilies.

And the celebrant? At the last minute - and almost certainly prompted by an attack of nerves - he dashed out and bought that black Chinese shirt. The consensus was that it considerably enhanced his authority.

And weddings in general

Ms Hedgehog often but not always blogs about tango, which is how I caught up with her. But here she is on the subject of weddings:

I'm all for people getting married, if they want to marry each other. But a marriage ceremony (at least in the European tradition) is a very simple affair. It traditionally requires the couple, some witnesses, and some sort of official, and the conversation, with answers understood, is basically as follows: 

•Who exactly are you two?

•What do you think you're doing?

•Are you sure?

•Anybody else here got a problem with that? This is your last chance. No?

•Do you hereby marry each other?

•Right, then, consider yourselves married, and the rest of yous are not to interfere.

There may or may not be religious additions; I have no objection to sitting quietly and watching that part, although I'm not that keen on being expected to participate as a matter of course. But in my book, the meat of it takes about five minutes, or twenty-five with sitting everyone down and faffing about, and it should immediately be followed by some announcement functionally similar to this:

•The food is this way, the drinks are that way, the dancefloor is over there, and the band [or DJ, according to budget] will be on in an hour's time.

Or, alternatively:

•We are now going to the pub. Follow me.

Waiting around for five hours making small talk in a cold tent in the middle of nowhere without access to food or a cup of tea is not a party. And speeches, if any, should be after the food.

She doesn't mention if she minds travelling vast distances to attend weddings, but if that's no problem, she would have enjoyed J and S's swift and charmingly low-key event.

My own (and only) wedding - more than four decades ago (yes, I was a child bride) - was also low key, but in another, entirely uncharming way. I'll enjoy telling you about it another day, when I don't have so many irksome, income-earning chores to attend to. All I'm prepared to say now is that my groom and I did not look like this

this













or this

 

My divorce was a bit more entertaining. But that too will have to wait for another day.

Every little girl's dream. Not

From all-over black to all-over white. And peach, pink and purple. As in wedding gowns. Clearly I have defective genes because not once during what turned out to be far too long a childhood did I dream of wearing one of these items for two minutes, let alone a whole day. I never was a cream-puff sort of girl.

Many are though, and all over the country they competed this month in More FM's National Bride Day. No prizes for guessing in which city this trio are battling a severe headwind in order to get to the event. And how delightful to read that one of them never even wore it on The Day - "I ditched him two weeks before the wedding."

Never mind the groom. It's the frock that matters!

I married in brown. It was vaguely tenty and zipped up the front. I accessorised it with a tangerine scarf, brown patent mary-janes, and a third-trimester bulge. It rained steadily. The groom looked like the walking dead, having drunk himself into a stupor the previous night and passed out cold on the path. The guests numbered 13. We couldn't afford a honeymoon. The marriage lasted seven years.

Maybe I should have worn white, after all.