Hilary Fannin: Give me that old time virginity

My friend Mary celebrated her 30th wedding anniversary recently. She reminded me the other day when we were walking on the beach.

“You forgot,” she said mildly.

“I always forget,” I replied.

Mary was a sweet bride, so young; creamy and lacy, her soft red hair curled under her veil. I was one of her bridesmaids. There were three of us, dressed in knee-length sea-green dresses, replete with bolero jackets. (Bolero jackets were all the rage in 1906 – sorry, I mean 1986.)

We bridesmaids wore cream court shoes and carried small posies, and when we were waiting, huddled together on the church steps, for the photographer to fire up his camera for the daguerreotype, a seagull flying overhead – how should I put it? – opened its birdie bowels and we were splattered in gull-shit.

“It’s a sign of luck!” we told each other, grabbing a passing groomsman and using his Brylcreemed mullet to scrape the excrescence off our shot-silk dresses.

And maybe it was luck: their marriage has lasted the course and their progeny are lovely; even the dog has a certain elan.

The court shoes came in handy: I went through a bit of a bridesmaid phase, clocking up three trips down the aisle in one year, on one occasion because the originally intended bridesmaid failed to materialise when someone went to pick her up from the airport, and I happened to fit the dress.

That particular gúna was extremely pink and somehow still attached to its security tag, a heavy lump of plastic that knocked against my knees as I trailed behind the bride in glorious Gougane Barra. (At least I think it was the bride; we’d barely met.)

Marriage minded

I was reading a survey recently comparing men’s and women’s aspirations around marriage in the years 1939 and 2008. In 2008, we were looking for love. We wanted mutual attraction and sociability, we wanted our putative spouses to be educated, intelligent and good-looking.

Our modern-day preoccupation with how our other halves measured up to their inky tattoos and designer underwear couldn’t have been more different from the 1939 pre-nup wish list, which included industriousness, refinement and neatness.

Chastity was the biggest loser over the decades. Virginity, a deal-breaker in 1939, was by about as popular as a suet sandwich and a reinforced gusset.

I was having a conversation with a young friend the other day. It was a post-traumatic-stress conversation. She’d been minding my house when the downstairs toilet began coughing up excrement all over the floor. (I was in a tapas bar at the time, where ignorance, along with the Rioja, was bliss.) Anyway, by the time the dyno-prod man arrived, she was on the verge of mild hysteria and possibly even diphtheria.

Later, to brighten up her day, we began discussing weddings. She’s soon to be a bridesmaid for her childhood friend, and has been tasked with organising the hen party.

“What are you doing for ‘the hen’?” I asked her.

“We’re going to a farm. We’re going to milk real cows with actual udders, and then were going to hold little piggies and drink cocktails.”

“Simultaneously?”

“Possibly.’

Old-fashioned nuptials

Hen parties on petting farms are but the tip of the iceberg; we seem to be in the middle of a full-scale reunion with traditional wedding values at the moment.

Totter into any wedding fair these days and witness the proliferation of “fairytale” reception suggestions, replete with candy carts full of childhood treats and photo booths where guests can snap themselves in jolly false moustaches for the overflowing wedding album.

Even virginity is on the way back. “Re-virginising”, another trend that makes about as much sense as carrying your dog around in your handbag, is all the rage apparently.

Re-virginisation is a multilayered process. You can spiritually re-virginise by seeing the world through more innocent, less world-weary eyes (as in “Ooh, look, a dishwasher tab! Wonder what that tastes like?). Or you can consider voluntarily abstaining from intercourse for a couple of years, which might make you a little bit grumpy but really isn’t going to change a thing.

Or you can find God and buy yourself a T-shirt with “I’m Saving Myself for the Holy Spirit” emblazoned on its front. Alternatively, if you have completely lost your mind, you can have a hymenoplasty.

So bring back the bolero days, eh, when the only useful thing to do with virginity was lose it, and the last thing on your tiny mind was to go looking for it again.