I went to a wedding ‘Weekend’ on Friday. I’d had to endure the ignominy of first ticking the plus-one box, and booking a double room at a country hotel near Keswick. And then when everything went south (except my breasts; I paid too much for them to do that), rapidly backtracking.
I sent the bride – a former colleague from my glossy days – a text about eight weeks before the Big Day. ‘It will just be the one. Me.’
After about a fortnight – why do some people take so long to reply? Who is she, Christine Lagarde? – she sent this: ‘That’s fine. I’ve had to put you on a different table of odds and sods.’
This didn’t bode well. The last time I’d gone to a wedding solo, I’d been put on a table with the bride’s mother’s Filipino cleaners. I suppose since Millennium Eve, when I suddenly became catnip to men (ie, a house and car owner, with access to free spa holidays), I’d become complacent when ticking plus-one boxes.
I had a ‘husband’, then a famous boyfriend, then David, which meant I accepted wedding invitations safe in the knowledge I was one half of a couple and therefore a lovely addition rather than a pariah. And isn’t it reassuring to know there’s an arm to lean on when you are in difficult shoes? Who can drive, park the car, carry your case, do up zips and assure you that you do in fact have a hat face. Fetch, like a dog, another flute of champagne. Supply a warm body to sit under the stars with at the end of the night, his black tie and your morals loosened. To caress your hand during the soppy bits.
As I drove across the Pennines, I was thinking all of the above, wondering how stupid I would look turning up in my pink strapless dress and matching heels on my own. Like Carrie without Big or even Small. I got to the hotel, had to park miles away, and lugged my huge case to reception. ‘Mrs?’ said the young woman behind the desk. ‘Miss!’ I hissed, Patsy fashion.
‘Was it a double?’ She kept peering round me, as if trying to spot my nonexistent boyfriend. ‘It still is,’ I hissed. ‘I haven’t slept in a single bed since 1972.’
She didn’t get the joke. No one does. No one emerged, either, to help with my case. It was an old-fashioned place (I hate trendy hotels; at the Hoxton in Holborn the bill is called ‘The Damage’) with no lift. As I staggered to the stairs, I noticed there was a Stannah stairlift. I somehow managed to squeeze both me and my case on to it. I pressed the ‘up’ button and felt for all the world as though I was about to go skiing.
After an excruciatingly slow and public journey, the thing shuddered to a stop and I started to heave myself out of the chair. There was a sort of concierge person hovering in the corridor (he might have been Hoovering), and he turned to assist me. ‘Are you the mother of the bride?’ I told him he will never wait tables in Keswick again.
But still, even his slight didn’t dampen my mood. I marvelled at the pristine white linen, the extra-wide pillows, the toiletries, the view. If I had checked in with a man, he would have put his dirty case on the bed, emptied his pockets of change and crumpled receipts, used the loo and then disappeared for a cigarette, leaving me alone to stare at a ghastly toiletry case that hasn’t been cleaned since 1982 (‘It’s leather,’ is probably the worst excuse I’ve ever heard for not washing something that houses your toothbrush), socks, hankies, nicotine gum, tobacco and dodgy plastic lighters. But never, ever a pair of pyjamas. Why do men, even has-beens and never-was-nor-will-bes, not think they need to cover up?
Why did I put up with those numbskulls? A wedding in the Peak District with my husband had been a disaster: he refused to drive on motorways as they ‘scared’ him. He ‘forgot’ to buy the happy couple – his friends, not mine – a gift. He left it too late to book a hotel, so we ended up in a b&b with dolly-sized Imperial Leather soap. When the groom presented the bride with a book of poems he’d penned, my husband whispered, ‘Bet he didn’t write that he’s done it with a bloke.’
Men. Great in theory. In practice they always kill the romance stone dead.
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