'Being the Best Man', the latest offering in the 'For Dummies' series, seems to be aimed at genuine half-wits, writes Donald Clarke
Readers will, I imagine, be familiar with the For Dummies series of books. Within the yellow binding, beginners can find useful information on basic strategies in activities such as aromatherapy, motorbike maintenance and business accounting. To this point, I had always assumed that by including the D-word in their products' titles, the publishers, rather than reaching out to the educationally subnormal, were wittily indicating that their target readership required little prior knowledge of the relevant activity. The most recent volume in the series, Being the Best Man For Dummies, argues, however, for a more literal reading of the volumes' spines. My apologies to Dominic Bliss, sometime editor of Stag & Groom magazine, but his book does seem to be aimed at genuine half-wits.
What are we to make of a tome that feels the need to explain how to go to the pub? While on a stag night, Bliss explains, revellers may wish to organise some sort of kitty to pay for the drinks. The best man - or "Bestie" as Bliss annoyingly dubs him - may drink, but should not get plastered.
Elsewhere he suggests that the best man who needs to rise early may wish to make use of an alarm clock. He reminds Bestie to charge his mobile phone. The reader - I'm not making this up - is even urged to wash and shave before the ceremony. Somehow Bliss resists the temptation to recommend inhalation followed by exhalation as a useful way of oxygenating the blood.
There is, however, a more malign strain of idiocy running through the text. Being the Best Man for Dummies presupposes a union of male friends that still regard stripping the soon-to-be-betrothed and handcuffing him to a lamp post as an enormous lark. The book - which, yes, recommends Dublin as a site for such revelries - exists in a world where bride's mothers are to be placated, their daughters are prone to blushing and the best man's speech contains sly references to the groom's previous amorous adventures.
A key paragraph details a moronic prank designed to lighten the mood during the ceremony. "Just before the groom gets dressed for the wedding, distract him for a moment and grab his shoes," Bliss writes. "Use white correction fluid to paint "HE" on the sole of his left shoe and "LP!" on the sole of his right shoe." Bliss, assuming a Church service, anticipates the groom kneeling before the altar and revealing a desperate plea for assistance.
What is going on here? What's with the cavalcade of clichéd characters? Why are we still pretending that marriage is a prison into which women fling men? The book seems to be taking place in the background of a sketch by Dick Emery, or the preamble of a Bernard Manning joke.
My memory of being a best man is very different. The first time I took on this task was back in that Bronze Age we called the 1980s. Young people's attitudes towards "The Wedding" have, as we might have expected, altered a great deal in the intervening decades. But, back in the Wang Chung years, we - the generation that grew up in the aftermath of the 1960s - would have been amazed to discover the nature of those coming shifts in outlook.
I may be doing the couple in question some disservice, but my distinct impression, drawn from the casual way the groom phrased the offer, was that, rather than wanting me to be the best man, he hoped I would act as (rolls eyes to heaven) "The Best Man". The implied inverted commas were inserted to distance ourselves from the whole preposterous palaver that our parents' generation demanded from a wedding day. There might very well be a "wedding cake". The bride might hold something that looked a little like "a bouquet". After vocalising a string of characteristically facetious remarks, I may be expected to propose "a toast". But it was made implicitly clear that the function was taking place solely to save both sets of parents, none of whom welcomed pre-marital cohabitation, from suffering any further apoplexies of disapproval.
Few of the traditional events that normally happen away from the parents' gaze were indulged in. A stag night, relic of a pre-feminist universe in which one felt uncomfortable using blue language before ladies, was not even discussed as a serious option. The notion of a hen night, this being the era before young women felt comfortable in pink cowboy hats, was, similarly, never put on the table. No cans were tied to the couple's car. Lamp posts were permitted to go about their business unencumbered by nude grooms.
Now I know what you are thinking. What a bunch of joyless, brown rice-scoffing, CND-supporting, sandal-wearing bores we must have been. That is not how I remember it. We drank ourselves insensible. We caused suspicious hempish odours in the hotel's potting shed. We leapt around the room to the Artist Then Still Known as Prince. My only duties were to make a speech and stand beside the happy couple for the photographs. That sounds a lot more fun than engaging in the year-long litany of arduous tasks detailed in the Dummies book.
Had you asked us at the time, we would surely have argued that all these creaky conventions to which we were (barely) paying lip service were fast going out of fashion. Just as men had stopped wearing hats to football matches and ladies had ceased from retiring to the drawing room after dinner, brides would no longer bother with elaborate white gowns and grooms would be free from the compunction to dress up in Edwardian formal wear. Our children's weddings would be short, cheap and unceremonious.
How wrong we were. A great deal has, over the past few years, been written in these pages and elsewhere about the truly revolting sums of money that today's couples see fit to spend on their stomach-churningly vulgar weddings. No modern nuptial seems complete without bag-piping ballet dancers, coaches made of spun-sugar and, for all I know, parasailing flamingos. Elton John's birthday parties are carried off with more restraint.
What has been commented on less often is the bewildering formality of these events. Those of us from the punk generation may have disagreed with members of the prog-rock generation about the ideology of the guitar solo, but we were united in our belief that the constricting conventions that ruled our parents' lives were gone forever. Now we find our children reviving nuptial traditions that have been out of favour since the 1950s.
What's going on? These youths believe, perhaps, that by aping the matrimonial habits of their grand-parents' era they, too, will create stable, old-fashioned marriages that only death can dissolve. Statistics for marital breakdown suggest the scheme is not working. Meanwhile, since you ask, the couple for whom I first acted as "Best Man" have remained contentedly united ever since.