Sam Binnie - The Wedding Diaries

Once Mum had mopped her eyes a bit, she found a dusty old bottle of pre-mixed Buck’s Fizz from some party back in 1987 and we all toasted one another.

Mum: Congratulations to you both!

Dad: We’re so proud of you two. We wish you every happiness.

Thom: Tessa, John – if we can spend one day of marriage as happy as you have always been, I’ll consider us truly blessed.

Me: I’m not particularly comfortable with public displays of emotion, but I will raise a toast to that. To my mum and dad, and the giant wedding extravaganza that will make their daughter as happy as they are!

Mum rolled her eyes a little at that but Dad chuckled, and on cue the phone rang: Thom’s mum. Leaving the mothers to discuss hats (or whatever), Thom bundled me into the car to go and see Susie, just around the corner, after swearing Mum and Dad (Mum) to secrecy for the next half-hour. Susie’s been my sister for about as long as I can remember, being two years older than me, and – if I block the time she cut all my hair off when I was four – has been my best friend for pretty much the entire time. Susie, Pete and the kids live in a lovely old terraced house, extended almost into oblivion by the previous owners, so although the front is tiny, it opens out into a huge warehouse space once you get inside. The front door is tricky to get through, though, being jammed with children’s boots and coats, Pete’s souvenirs from around the world and a huge window seat that doesn’t fit in the hallway but Susie insists is necessary, glamorous hallway furniture. She’s going through a Sunset Boulevard stage at the moment, so thinks a lilac velvet chaise longue is exactly what a terrace in North Finchley requires.

She opened the door to us in her apron (not only her apron, obviously) with hands covered in flour and her six-year-old twins Lily and Edward scampering around her.

Lily and Edward: Thom! Hurray!

Thom: Susie. Children. [picks the Twins up by their ankles and carries them off upside down to the garden]

Me: [faintly] Hi … children …

Susie: Come and have a drink.

Oh, Susie, so good with the drinks offers. After Mum’s ecstasies, I could have murdered a Band on the Run. She held up her floury hands and kicked a foot towards the fridge for me to help myself. After rummaging around for a while, I gave her my most disgusted look.

Me: You don’t have anything to drink, do you?

Susie: Ooooh … funny you should say that. I bought some vodka a few months ago—

Me: [snatching up a pair of kitchen tongs and brandishing them in her face] Susie …

Susie: No. We probably don’t. Sorry!

Me: Is Pete around to do an alcohol run?

Susie: Since it’s neither Christmas nor the Twins’ birthday, I think it’s safe to assume he’s not.

Also, Susie: not so good with possessing the wonderful drinks she offers. But the few times she has, combined with the frequency of her offers means she is somehow still seen as a glorious homemaker. I blame Lily and Edward. Their charm and beauty distract from the true horrors of their mother’s hostess talents. And since Susie’s husband Pete is almost never at home to ease her household burden, frequently away with his glamorous travel agent job, the fact that her children still have their full complement of fingers/legs/heads ought really to be enough for us.

We chatted for a minute or two, until I reminded her of my weekend away with Thom. I knew she wasn’t really paying attention when she asked for details since she was so busy rolling out scores of pastry cases for some school event; I repaid her with a mind-numbing parody of our mother’s anecdotes, in the style of a particularly dry shopping list.

Me: … And then we looked at the baths, so that was five o’clock, then we went back to the hotel, then we changed and went to dinner, at seven … no, eight … no … was it? … No. Eight o’clock. Then we were at the restaurant. Oh. And then he proposed.

Susie: [stunned] Is that a joke?

And they say we Carlows are unromantic. Besides our inability with languages (Susie and I once took a trip to Italy in our teens and when our passports were stolen, discovered that the only Italian we’d picked up was seventeen different kinds of pasta) it seems we also face romantic situations with the same facial expression and tone of voice of someone asked to kick a piglet.

When she realised that I wasn’t joking, she lifted a floury hand to her throat, then clasped my hands between hers. As she warmly expressed her joy and excitement with little giggles and happy sighs, and clutched my arms, I suddenly twigged what she was up to, and looked down to find myself covered in flour up to the elbows. She started backing away, chuckling, but I held up my hands – Peace – and promised that I only wanted to wipe the mess off her neck. When she gave me that fatal moment of trust, I grabbed as much flour as I could from the counter and ground it into her hair.

Thom came in with the children moments later to find me bent over the worktop as Susie held my ponytail and rubbed my face in the flour, both of us weak with laughter. Susie called the Twins over.

Susie: [sternly] I don’t ever want to see you doing this to another child, do you understand?

Twins: Yes, Mummy.

Edward: [thoughtful] But can we do it to adults?

Susie: No.

Lily: But we can do it to Aunt Kiki?

Thom and Susie: Yes .

TO DO:

Dress

Venue

Food

Honeymoon

Find out if I absolutely have to invite own sister

August 18th

My colleagues at Polka Dot Books were exactly as supportive as I’d expected: Alice was excited, Carol suspicious (‘And how long will you be expecting to take for Honeymoon?’ Me, to self: Why is she making that sound like a disgusting illness?) and Norman apathetic. Carol’s our Commissioning Editor at Polka Dot and one of the grumpiest people I’ve met, but she speaks with such a beautiful tone, like a cross Joanna Lumley, that I never really mind her irritable pronouncements, while Norman, Head of Accounts and taciturn to the point of muteness mostly, would be newsworthy if something caused him to react at all. Alice is my closest friend there, and a member of the Hamilton family, of Hamilton Industry fame, the tooth-achingly rich owners of 60% of the world’s chalk mines. I still can’t tell if Alice works here for a dare, or if she’s trying to prove something to her parents. She got the job through connections, of course, her father being the godson of our boss’s mother (this is what Alice’s whole life is like), so I was tempted to tip her off the fire escape when she joined the company. She’s always immaculately dressed in DVF or modern Chanel with a few choice pieces of Whistles and Topshop thrown in, and I’ve never, ever seen her with egg on her blouse or a large bump of hair sticking out the top of her ponytail. Her handbags alone would be enough to make a grown woman weep, but combine that with the face of an angel and the wallet of a Trump and Alice completely terrifies most of our authors (while others are completely in love with her – one a little bit of both), so she turned out to be a great guard dog for the office. It also gradually became clear that like many of those lusciously maned ex-Edinburgh Uni girls, she was great at publicity, pulling on her spiderweb to get our authors into great magazines and media slots, so we all had a meeting behind her back and decided we’d let her live. She’s incredibly posh but undercuts it all with a deadpan humour that took me three months to get but now is my favourite thing about going to work each day. She can say anything – literally, anything – to our authors and to Tony, the boss, and they might blink for a second but will never, ever disbelieve her or question quite how filthy/offensive/untrue what it is she’s saying.