The Gamophobe Blues

There are three very specific things I hate: Cologne Cathedral, bananas and weddings. Unlike pollen, it is possible to avoid these things, but weddings are the hardest. No one would be too offended if you said you hated a German cathedral or a yellow fruit, but you try telling someone who has invited you to their wedding that you would rather eat a toenail sandwich, and you get a different reaction. 

I’ve been lucky. The year of my birth must have coincided with a rogue spore in the native soil which left most of my peer group unwilling to tie the knot. I only went to a handful of weddings in my twenties, when I was still relatively well-behaved. In my thirties, I don’t think I went to a single wedding. In my forties, there was a spate of them: work colleagues, second weddings, and an excitable, camp flurry of gay weddings when it became legal. And it was in this decade of my life that I began to misbehave. 

It was not necessarily driven by malice on my part, but it certainly free-wheeled on an extraordinary consumption of alcohol. Unless you are a committed teetotaller, or just a sensible person, it is difficult to avoid the effects of ethanol at a wedding. There is nothing much else to do but accept glass after glass of proffered champagne, and then, when you get thirsty, to drink pint after pint of lager. It cannot be too widely known that champagne does not mix well, particularly with an uncouth poor relation. 

And coupled with too much drink, there is a marked absence of romance in my soul. I know a woman who was born without a middle toe on her left foot. I had an uncle who was born with no sense of smell, and my neighbour has a child who cannot feel pain, which sounds great but it really isn’t. When I was born, it was with the full complement of necessary parts, except for that one bit which makes people want to watch Love Story. 

I am not going to relate here just how badly I have behaved at weddings, because to be honest, I can’t bear to think about it. These are the memories which keep me awake at night, tortured enough to get up and watch repeats of Murder She Wrote at 3am. They must have made eight hundred episodes and Jessica Fletcher doesn’t age. Incredible. So when my cousin Jimmy rang me to ask me to be his plus-one, I told him no. But to be fair, Jimmy is as bad as me at weddings. He was once invited to a wedding in Iceland, Iceland! and the bride and groom asked everyone to wear fancy dress which reflected ancient Icelandic mythology. So all the various guests spent a fortune to make them look like figures from the Nibelungenlied, and Jimmy just went as himself. Anyhow, he got really, really drunk and threw up, copiously, in the atrium. When a guest looked at him aghast, he told them he’d come as a volcano. 

Jimmy is an ugly fella, but he’s got tons of money, so his relationship with women is like catnip on a turd. But at the time he rang me he was in-between women, and the touchy thing was that the bride and groom were new neighbours and it would be tough to offend them when they live just next door. I understood that, and so against my better judgement, I agreed to accompany him. 

***

This couple were new to the area and had clearly been networking. With the exception of family and a few old friends, most of the people at their wedding were people like Jimmy, neighbours, work colleagues, and the bloke who ran the corner shop. To me, they looked like they were trying too hard. It wasn’t their first rodeo, not by a long shot, but she insisted on the full church wedding and a dusky gown, and there was just something about them which suggested that people were commodities to them. But the service was nice enough, and you can say what you like about Anglicans, they keep things short. I have never contributed to church heating funds for this very reason. Me and Jimmy were in the third row on the right side of the church, which probably has a name. Sitting next to me was a man with the biggest nose I have ever seen. Now I am not nose-ist; in fact, I quite like a decent schnozzle on a man, but this nose was big enough to arrive twenty minutes before the rest of him. And I felt that surge, like the bubbles in a freshly-opened bottle of pop, and made the terrible mistake of glancing at Jimmy, who made a noise like Steve McQueen when he drank the potcheen in The Great Escape. The whole time they were making their vows, I was pinching my wrist so hard that it bled. It was like the torture of a minute’s silence for a person you couldn’t stand. 

When we got outside, (and everything was within walking distance of Jimmy’s house, so no car), a woman approached me. The bride and groom were having their photos taken, and me and Jimmy were on our way to the local pub before the reception. She asked me if I would give a gift to the bride and groom, and then offered up a beautifully wrapped box. There was no card, and I noticed that the gift tag was empty. When I queried her about it, she just told me he’d know who it was from. And when she’d gone, Jimmy grabbed my arm and said I didn’t get them a present. I didn’t know that was still a thing. 

 But it was still a thing, because when we got to the reception, everyone was lining up with presents, and the thing was that you had to walk past the married couple, who you were obliged to kiss on the cheek, before giving your offering to a sour in-law who was drenched in a perfume I don’t like. So of course, we just gave them the gift we’d been given, in the hope that it contained a Fabergé egg. Lucky escape, said Jimmy. 

You know, in lighter moments of reflection, this wedding could almost have cured me of gamophobia. The thing is that everyone there was just a complete twat. It was nothing definable, like thugs and brawlers, or a clay-pigeon shoot of bad speeches, or a crying bridesmaid, but rather that everyone was a bit weird, which I guess is what can happen when you throw a lot of unconnected people together. And the knowledge gave me a vicarious thrill, because myself and Jimmy, effortlessly and without forethought, suddenly found ourselves on our best behaviour. There was nothing to rebel against, because we both intuitively knew that every person in this room was capable of embarrassing themselves, so why should we bother? The menu was a disappointment, though. The dessert was butterscotch sauce and bananas, and although we were still on the entrees, I was getting worked up about it. All I needed now was a wedding cake in the shape of Cologne Cathedral and that would be the hat-trick. 

There was a woman at our table wearing a light blue dress with those long, wizard sleeves. According to the place-setting, she was called Ephedra. Of course she was. The bloke sitting next to her, John, was her husband, but Ephedra only had eyes for the bloke sitting to her left. She was knocking the wine back, and getting louder by the minute, making disparaging comments about her husband whilst stroking the other man’s reluctant sleeve. His wife was furious, and I could see a real humdinger brewing. ‘What do you do?’ she asked my cousin at one point - and Jimmy, who hates that question, said ‘I shag sheep. It’s big on TikTok.’ 

When they were clearing the plates, Ephedra went to the ladies room. Big sigh of relief, but when she returned, we all noticed an unpleasant smell - and when she lifted her sleeve to slug more wine, we all noticed that it was covered in poo. My cousin made that Steve McQueen noise again, and when she noticed it too, she fled from the reception. Funnily enough, John stayed. There is a lesson here: don’t take a Number Two when wearing wizard sleeves. It’s probably not something the Dalai Lama would say, but even so. Wise words. 

After the main course, Jimmy goes for a riddle. On his return, he told me that there was an old guy in the men’s room, sitting in a leather armchair, who appeared to be dead. 

‘Have you told anyone?’ I don’t know if I can be arsed .. ‘Jimmy! God’s sakes! You’d have thought someone would have noticed he’s missing,’ I hissed. He looks like the third husband of a second cousin, said Jimmy. So no. Probably not. 

Turns out he was dead, but it didn’t stop the wedding. Poor bloke. Mind you, if I was going to die in the upholstered toilets of a wedding venue, I’d do it before the banana course too. 

So, food done, speeches finished, tables cleared - and Jimmy and I were still on our best behaviour. In the corner, and surrounded by solicitous friends, I noted that the bride was crying. Apparently her new husband had an urgent work call, and had assured her that he’d be back as soon as he’d dealt with it. I’d have thought he would leave it alone on his wedding day, she sobbed. ‘Well, he has to pay for that honeymoon somehow,’ said a friend, with more than a hint of schadenfreude. I happened to overhear this because I had to walk past them to get outside. I was in desperate need of a cigarette and the alcohol was starting to hit me a little. And it was quite a lovely evening really, what the romantics might call intoxicating. The dark was setting in, and the strains of a disco were floating on the air - as was the sound of two people having sex. It seemed that the groom was working alright, but not in the way his bride thought. This wedding just keeps getting better, I thought, as I ran to tell Jimmy. 

We stayed a couple more hours, had a bit of a dance and a lot of a drink. The groom came back, all straightened up and going into far too much detail about why he’d been called out, which is a ‘tell’ the new bride will figure out soon enough. We made a mutual decision to leave when everyone started throwing up. Botulism from the overripe bananas, apparently. Jimmy is bananaphobic too, so we just skidded right out of there with our heads higher then they’d ever been at this stage of a wedding. It felt like we’d been cured. We hadn’t got shit on our sleeves, we hadn’t died in the toilet, we hadn’t had morally questionable sex in a bush, and we hadn’t vomited. And I hadn’t grabbed the microphone and sang Mercedes Benz, and I could go on about all the things I hadn’t done, but I’ll never be ready for that level of sharing. It is enough to say that me and my cousin left that wedding on a nebulous cloud of joy. 

***

A couple of days later I got a phone call from Jimmy. He sounded … terse. 

‘You remember that wedding present that wasn’t ours? The one the mystery woman gave you?

‘It was only two days ago, Jimmy —’

‘The one you wrote our names on …’

‘Yep.’

‘Turns out it was a box of toilet paper.’

‘Useful.’

‘Used.’

‘Oh. That old chestnut. Should have realised ..’

‘I’m telling you cousin .. either they move to Tobermory or I will.’