A great many troths will be plighted today, accompanied by a flurry of social media images of engagement rings concealed in unusual places. But the troth-plighting is only the start of the great organisational juggernaut that will come to dominate every waking moment until the ceremony. In the vanguard of the juggernaut there looms the wedding planner, offering advice on costly nuptial fal-lals of whose existence you were, pre-troth, entirely unaware.
As we emerge from the privations of the past couple of years, the temptation to plan a post-pandemic whopper of a wedding must be overwhelming. But the Marriage Foundation, a charity dedicated to promoting the advantages of marriage, sounds a cautionary note. A survey commissioned by the Foundation found that weddings costing more than £20,000 were twice as likely to end in divorce than more modest ceremonies.
This news doesn’t come as a surprise: the so-called “curse of Hello!”– the belief that celebrity couples whose glamorous wedding pictures appeared in the magazine were doomed to split up – has proved to be not wholly ill-founded. The ostentatiously performative weddings of celebs might seem to occupy a rarefied realm where the temporary nature of the alliance is factored in, along with the preposterous designer wedding dress.
But the influence of celebrity, both in selling product and framing modern mores, has led to a steady normalisation of weddings as extravagant displays of that most perishable of commodities, romance, rather than the solemnisation of a relationship intended to last a lifetime. Frugality apparently offers no sounder footing for a durable partnership: the survey found that almost a third of weddings attended by fewer than 10 guests ended in divorce.
Yet between the extremes of Bridezilla and the wedding as dour non-event, there must exist some ideal equilibrium – a cheerful presaging of a happy-ever-after. Years ago, a friend’s wedding combined grandeur and simplicity to pleasing effect: the solemn words of the Book of Common Prayer, followed by a reception at which an admirable combination of very good champagne and roast beef and pickled onion sandwiches was served. Evidently, it worked: decades later, they are still married.
Reasonably priced classics
Each year a windfall harvest of classic books comes out of copyright. Among the titles entering the public domain in the US last year was F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. A flurry of new print editions followed, to the chagrin of James West, the general editor of the Cambridge Edition of Fitzgerald’s works, who notes numerous outrages committed against a “delicate work of literature”. These include grotesque misprints, hideous jacket designs and an edition that omits the final three pages.
Caveat emptor, you might think, yet the publishing of cheap editions of classics need not be a cynical exercise in profiteering. Well done, it can offer access to a world of marvellous discoveries and old favourites. The tottering pile of books by my bedside includes the Wordsworth Classics editions of E F Benson’s complete Mapp and Lucia, and Constance Garnett’s translation (a classic in itself) of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. With sturdy bindings, clear print, handsome cover art and intelligent critical apparatus, they are a model of bookish excellence, for £2.99 apiece.
