The British at Weddings and Whatnot

My weekend was filled with lots of brilliant things. I went to the wedding of 2 of my favourite people, and it was, well, brilliant. The weather was perfect, my hair behaved itself, there was copious serve-yourself ice-cream, and I had the best lemon tart I’ve ever had in my whole life. Most important of all, the bride and groom looked to be having the absolute time of their lives too. And given that this wedding has pretty much been a decade in the planning, there was a heady blend of happiness and celebrating (plus a soupçon of relief that it was all going so perfectly) among everyone present.

Weddings are great for many reasons, new shoes and complimentary hairspray in the bathroom aside. And British weddings, when friends and family from all over the place descend on [insert relevant shire here] for the weekend, are particularly great. When else do you get to play massive Connect 4, for example? Or throw rings at sticks? – which, incidentally, I always thought was called hoopla. Turns out if you’re posh or at a wedding, you have to call it quoits. When else would I get the opportunity to discover that I still know the routine for the Macarena with no prompting, 17 years after it was released. Or that I apparently know all the girls’ names from Lou Bega’s 1999 smash-hit Mambo No. 5, in the right order. Impressive, no?

Our choice of accommodation for the weekend was equally brilliant. I always thought a Premier Inn was just like a Travelodge, but with added Lenny Henry. Instead, I experienced a level of luxury that I was simply not expecting from a budget hotel. I had to choose between 3 types of pillow. I didn’t even know there were 3 types of pillow. (I still don’t; I panicked, opted for one of each, and slept like a dream.

And, something my very observant French friend Olivier pointed out, the curtain rails are on ever-so-slightly parallel tracking so that the curtains overlap, preventing any suggestion of daylight from entering the room. This is the sort of attention to detail I freaking love.

The one low-point came during breakfast, when we all had to break it to Olivier that in England, you make hot chocolate with water. It was awful. He looked horror-struck and completely incredulous, as though we were clinging on to wartime rationing or had some kind of weird Puritan self-denial thing going on. I mean, he’s right. Hot chocolate made with water tastes like dish-water with a few melted Cadbury’s Buttons chucked in it. But asking for specially-prepared hot milk to be brought for you seems a bit much, doesn’t it.

It was fine, though. The staff already knew we were mental. When we’d first walked in, the waitress had asked ‘Have you all had a buffet breakfast before?’ – a polite way of saying ‘Don’t ask me for anything; just get it yourself’. And our friend George, who now lives in Paris and finds it oddly challenging when he has to interact with English people, had inexplicably answered ‘No’.

The waitress looked alarmed; clearly this had never happened before. But, ever the professional, she quickly recovered and duly explained how a buffet system works. And we, in true British fashion, all nodded and smiled and looked politely interested in this new-fangled way of serving food. A buffet, you say? What a clever idea.

Aren’t the British brilliant?