The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give

The business of attending a wedding is something I have a personal moan about at least once every two weeks in the Summer months. At some point in the last decade, weddings?have become almost prohibitively expensive and irritating to attend.

Weddings have lost the run of themselves and just attending has become a massive financial outlay, so much so that I have had to turn down invites because I simply can’t afford to go. Maybe it seems shabby to b*tch about attending a party held in honour of the love between two people who are presumably your?friends, two people who also presumably?tolerated attending your nuptials, however, MY nuptials weren’t a two-day, multi-destination extravaganza?of too many handsy uncles and not enough booze. So I reserve the right to complain about the weddings of others because’my wedding was a sound wedding. That’s right there is such a thing as a sound wedding and they are far too few and far between these days.

So without further ado, can we please stand and raise our glasses to SOUND weddings…

To the weddings that don’t require using up leave in work in order to attend.

And the weddings that don’t require a mandatory door charge aka a wedding present (no less than €100 a head, cash only, Blue Books Vouchers will?not?be accepted).

To the weddings that don’t require an over-the-top dress code (full disclosure: I stated black tie on my invites and I recognise now what a complete d*ckhead that makes me, I apologise).

And the weddings that don’t require guests to use a portaloo (I am clearly already too old and curmudgeonly for weddings and I am supposed to the core demographic).

To the weddings that don’t necessitate foreign travel (I take issue with the destination wedding as a concept, my issue is that I can’t afford to go).

And the weddings that DO have a free bar (soundness personified!).

And also the Weddings where everyone does that thing where the guests dance?in a big circle with the bride and groom in the middle and then periodically rush at them. Cracktastic.

To the Weddings that don’t banish us to conversational purgatory on Table 19 (Hint: the bigger the number, the less fun your tablemates will be).

To the weddings that don’t force guests to wait 90 minutes in a freezing cold church while the bride is being coy/ traditionally late.

And to the weddings where the speeches are not approximately nine years long.

To the weddings with midnight deep-fried beige snacks – YUSSSSS, more beige foodstuffs, please.

And to the weddings that don’t insist on long swathes of the day being spent waiting for dinner/photographs/SOMETHING to happen.

Cheers.