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Time has telescoped cruelly. Eleven months ago there was a year to prepare for my daughter Ellie’s wedding. No worries. Lots of time to select venue, muse on the wording of invitations, fantasise about hats. Suddenly it is four weeks to The Day. Things have not been made easier by a computer crash which means that I have lost the incredibly efficient Excel guest list I was given by the Happy Couple (HC) to check off replies as they came in.
I had my third anxiety dream last night – a relatively mild one which merely involved a karaoke turning up instead of the disco and my brother and the best man singing ‘I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts’ in unison with some regrettably explicit gestures.
But it was, I reflected, awake yet again at 3.33 am, better than the discovery that Ellie’s father’s new partner had on exactly the same outfit as I was, or desperately swimming after my hat (such a pretty one too) as it floated away down the Thames like a dying humming bird.
When the HC, my three other daughters (the bridesmaids), an usher, and the uncle who is playing the music at the cermony came to toast my nurturing skills over lunch on Mothering Sunday, I asked if they had suffered similar panic dreams, and was relieved to hear that they had. A whirlwind had hit in during Jamie’s stag night, and the guests at Ellie’s hen weekend had traipsed the streets of London trying to persuade a maître d to let all seventeen of them into a restaurant on a Saturday night without a booking.
As they seemed so calm about the actual wedding, I mentioned the computer crash and waited for the sky to fall in. Cheerful grins. ‘Don’t worry, Ma, you sent us a copy last week – and we know about all the others. Do you want to know who’s sitting where?’
We all did – and we all had our own bright ideas on the subject. It was one of those Tense Moments I had heard about from friends who have been through the nupt-prep mill. But comfortably lined with roast lamb and a couple of glasses of robust rioja, and now sucking bittermints contemplatively, we could conduct negotiations cordially.
Soon we were all kneeling on the carpet in a circle with a confetti of scraps of paper, each bearing the name of a guest, to sort into ten groups of ten. First we carefully matched interests. Then we began to get bolder, putting extremely opposites together, splitting up married couples with gay abandon.
For the first time since the wedding was announced, I had a genuinely goddesslike sense of power. I suspect that Jamie and Ellie will quietly default to their original plan once they have given me time to forget our wonderfully imaginative arrangements, but what the hell. Life’s a lot easier when Ma proposes, but the HC disposes.
So. No worries then. Except for my rash promise to make the wedding cake. Four hired hexagonal tins are downstairs on the kitchen table, and I am about to go down and stir up 16 eggs, 10 lbs fruit, etc etc. But how on earth am I going to stop the pillars plunging through the icing of the layer of cake below? Oh, and I still haven’t seen a hat half as sweet as the one that floated away.
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