Ding dong, here we go again. Wedding season’s back. Jeff Bezos is getting hitched this month in Venice; Selena Gomez is rumoured to be doing it in California, and will Zendaya go full meringue when she walks down the aisle towards Tom Holland? What to wear! Hat or no hat? And do you really have to contribute to the happy couple’s honeymoon fund?
Over the past decade or so, I’ve been to upwards of 60 weddings. Splendid, on the one hand. Church bells, big white dress, glass of fizz – don’t mind if I do. At a conservative estimate, I’ve eaten hundreds of salmon canapés and sat through hours of speeches (sitting if I was lucky; standing if I wasn’t).
Back in the day, my mother is fond of telling me, weddings meant church, then a glass of champagne and a piece of cake at the reception before everyone went home in time for dinner. No big party, no black tie, no photo booth, no hashtags, certainly no doughnut wall. Because weddings now have become an extravagant and competitive spectacle, no detail overlooked. A basket of flip-flops to the side of the dance floor for when guests get sick of their heels, monogrammed napkins, Aesop soap in the posh Portaloos – are you at a wedding or a fancy corporate do? Here’s how to survive this summer, whether you’ve been invited to Venice or not…
1 The invitation will arrive with 43 inserts about nearby hotels, local taxi firms, the church, the reception address and timings. Do not lose these, as I often do, meaning you have no idea where to be and when. Recently, I texted the maid of honour to check the time of the service on the wedding day itself. This was unpopular.
2 Pace yourself. There may be more than one day of celebrations, there could even be several, especially if the ceremony is abroad. I know of a destination wedding that lasted a week where every single night had its own theme. Worse still, some of these nights were fancy dress. The packing was horrendous.
3 Observe the wedding’s ‘social-media policy’, which may be stipulated on one of the 43 invitation inserts. Several years ago, every bride and groom had their own hashtag for guests to use whenever they posted a picture. Thankfully, this trend has cooled a bit, and couples often say they don’t want any photos going online at all.
4 If the wedding is somewhere desperately rural, remember to book a taxi weeks in advance. Once, for a wedding in Dorset, I called five local cab firms the day before a friend’s wedding only to find they were all fully booked. This resulted in me sleeping in my car after the reception because I’d drunk too much champagne to drive back to my B&B. I now book taxis good and early.
5 Details of whether the couple have a wedding list will also be on the invitation. Nowadays, there may a disclaimer saying they really don’t need a present – ‘your presence is our present!’ – but they include details of their wedding list anyway, just in case you do want to buy them a set of salad servers or donate towards their honeymoon. If it’s a close friend, I tend to ignore the wedding list and buy them something more personal, even though they would almost certainly have preferred the salad servers or donation towards their holiday in Antigua. (You can also have a wedding list on Amazon, if you like, which is no doubt what Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sánchez are doing.)
6 You don’t have to wear something new for every wedding you go to. In recent years, as weddings have become bigger and glitzier and more designed for social media, so has the pressure on everyone to dress as if they’re off to the Oscars. New dress, new shoes, new bag, new earrings, perfect nails, perfect hair. People spend hundreds – more! – on their outfits. And they’re not even the ones getting married. We can also blame fast fashion. But guess what? Nobody will die of shock if you wear a dress you already own. Alternatively you could hire something, which means you feel shiny and new but haven’t had to splurge. You also don’t have to wear a hat although, if you fancy it, this year’s Royal Ascot guide mentions something called a ‘hatinator’. This is larger and sturdier than a fascinator, less intimidating than a hat.
7 Work out where the canapés are coming from at the reception. Stand there. A friend and I recently hovered near the kitchen area at a wedding, which meant we were offered trays of everything as soon as they emerged – mini blinis, asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, tuna tartare and so on. Eventually, this greed became embarrassing and we had to move away. But at least we were full…
8 …which was lucky as the speeches went on for a while. Brides often make speeches these days and, yay for feminism and all that, but in addition to the father of the bride, the groom and one, two or even three best men (if you’re really unlucky), this makes for a long reception. Short and sweet, please, everyone. We’ve been on our feet drinking for two hours.
9 If you used Chat GPT to write your speech, don’t mention it to try to impress us all. It seemed innovative and interesting three years ago, but lazy and thoughtless now.
10 Talk to people either side of you at dinner. This may seem a very obvious rule but, without wishing to sound like my grandmother, people can forget nowadays. Not long ago, a friend resorted to shouting through the candelabra at a wedding guest on the opposite side of the table because both men either side of her spent the entire dinner talking to their other sides. If you notice someone stranded without anyone to talk to, include them. It is good manners.
11 Quick glass of water?
12 Similarly, do you really need that paloma cocktail after dinner? (Espresso martinis have had their day; now it’s often the grapefruit-and-tequila paloma instead.) OK, maybe one, but do you need four? The bar area of any wedding after dinner often develops a feeding-time-at-the-zoo vibe – people who were just hours earlier sitting primly in church suddenly elbowing others out of the way as if they’ll die of dehydration unless they get another martini. A little decorum, please.
13 Doughnut walls – literally a wall covered with doughnuts – and cupcake stacks were a craze a few years ago, largely for social-media purposes. But old-fashioned tiered cakes are back. Elegant. Classic. Pieces will often be cut and circulated after dinner, for when guests need a sugar hit. I’ve been known to take a couple and stash them in my clutch for the journey home. Tip: wrap them well in napkins as rural taxi drivers don’t like crumbs.
14 Never, ever take your shoes off on a dance floor. I know it’s tempting when you’ve been wearing heels for nearly eight hours, your toes have gone numb and you want to have a Kate Bush moment. But take it from one who once lacerated her foot on a shard of broken champagne flute, and subsequently left the sort of bloody trail from the dancefloor to the Portaloos that would interest a murder detective: leave your shoes on.
15 Try not to get so drunk that you walk into a marquee pole, mistake it for a person and try to start a fight with it, as my friend Tom did last year at a wedding in the Cotswolds.
16 Another glass of water?
17 On the invitation that you may or may not have lost, there will be a finish time. ‘Carriages at midnight’, it may have said, despite the fact that most people (if we exclude royals) haven’t left a wedding in a carriage for centuries. At this point, there will be a mass exodus and dozens of drunk people squabbling over taxis. All too often, I’ve found myself shivering in a Gloucestershire field at midnight while screams of ‘Jakey! Come on, this is ours! He’s going to the Dog and Duck!’ echo around me. Do not steal anyone else’s taxi. This happened a few years ago, in December, at a wedding just outside Hull, and it took the taxi firm 45 minutes to despatch another. Three of us stood huddled together for warmth, although we’d also managed to steal half a wheel of brie from the cheeseboard, so we ate that to pass the time. That’s the thing about weddings: they can start out so glamorous, and yet often end standing in a field, cold, tired, drunk and eating cheese.
18 Turn down the recovery brunch next day. It’ll seem like a fun idea when you receive the invitation, but the morning after the wedding you’ll wake up in a lumpy B&B bed with a tongue like a flip-flop and will in no way feel like making yourself presentable for polite chit-chat with people you don’t know terribly well. Save yourself. Say no.
