'Maybe I know the wrong people; I never get invited to weddings'

FIFTYSOMETHING:I'M WORRIED about Will and Kate. According to the magazine rack in the supermarket, the pair are "working hard to keep their love alive". Presumably, marrying in the full glare of the hungry public and several dozen cavalry horses takes a toll. It's tough having the world peering down a lens, scoping your well-oiled assets, and worse, you can't even have second helpings of the suckling pig without some commoner with a Twitter account speculating that you're up the duff.

I didn’t buy the magazine. I’ve plenty of theories of my own about marriage: namely, you don’t tempt fate by rattling a fragile institution with bells and bleedin’ whistles.

Weddings scare me: all that optimism and turkey breast, all those glittering expectations and brittle acrylic fingernails. My instinct is to proceed with caution. This is a tendency not shared, apparently, by the soon-to-be-marrying people of Ireland or, as they are described in various online forums, the “engaged community”, a term that makes the rest of us sound pleasantly louche and indifferent. According to the latest wedding statistics, garnered like muddied confetti long after the fake tan has faded, Irish couples spend, on average, around €30,000 on their big day and honeymoon.

Holy cow, that’s an awful lot of recession-dampened bucks just to give your Auntie Betty a day out.

I remember weddings in the 1980s when chicken’n’chips in a basket, a couple of bottles of Blue Nun and swaying to Duran Duran on a sticky dancefloor was about as heady as things got. Those were the days when the bride sported a semblance of hastily reconstructed virginity along with her shoulder pads, and the whole point of getting married was so you could sleep with your boyfriend without your mother turning into a distilled howl of outrage.

Not any more. We may be skint, we may be pucker-lipped with frog-kissing, but we have embraced Olympian notions about the marriage game. And for that added frisson of aggravation, many of us hold our nuptials abroad.

A friend went to a wedding in Venice recently: it was a three-day event, champagne and canapes and 200 guests in brand-new shoes and slimming knickers tottering across the canal bridges to the reception. The bride wore the GNP of Micronesia on her back; the groom wore spats. The dress code read “Venetian chic”; my friend wore his funeral suit, his attire influenced more by flimsy economics than high fashion.

He had a blast, mind you, and after the bones of roasted swans had been sucked dry and the guests had bathed in the spittle of a thousand virgins (okay, I’m making that bit up), the couple went on their merry way, stopping briefly on the Rialto to offer the credit-card companies a pound of flesh or their first-born as a down payment on the rapidly accruing interest.

Someone else I know recently attended a family wedding in Portugal. The guests were wined and dined and driven through the narrow streets in an air- conditioned coach to a hilltop village where the bridal party walked over rose petals to reach the altar. Later, when the guests had licked their fingers clean of crayfish and kicked off their shoes to dance on the yellow sand, a bevy of lifeguards materialised to patrol the beach and make sure the guests didn’t drown in the drink. I like that kind of attention to detail. Nice to know someone else is looking out for you when you’re incapable of negotiating a pair of kitten heels.

They had a ball too, and came home mouthing words like “memorable” and “uplifting”, and meaning it.

Maybe I just know all the wrong people, but I never get invited to weddings (surprise surprise, I hear you mutter). Scour my house with a tiara and you won’t find a gilt-edged invitation stuck in the mirror or a modest card on recycled paper coyly inviting me to celebrate knots being tied. Nor will you see the latest wedding-invitation manifestation I spied pinned to a friend’s noticeboard: a photo essay of a couple embracing nature, a montage of images of the happy pair piggybacking through woodland, followed by a summons to catapult them into the happily ever after.

Okay, so obviously I’m a churlish old bag who wouldn’t know how to wear a fascinator if it was wrapping itself around my truculent throat and choking me. To those of you about to embark on wedding planning (October, when the nights lengthen and winter rattles her bones, is apparently a hot month for popping the question), enjoy.

And if you’re feeling the pinch, try cracking open a bottle of Black Tower and rolling out the cheese sticks. Careful though, you just might unleash a bunch of fiftysomethings, clutching their compilation tapes on the dance floor.