On Fools and Fine Ladies.

I was thinking this morning that I see church weddings as being somewhat akin to good old fashioned British pantomimes. It’s partly the rituals and the stuff the vicar spouts, but it’s also the fancy dress on display – the men in hired dress coats, top hats, and sometimes other paraphernalia which never sees the light of day on any other occasion, and the women in those curious constructions they place on their heads to look as laughably un-feminine as possible.

And then I thought that if ever I get invited to another church wedding, I might seriously consider hiring a mediaeval fool’s costume (complete with bells.) And when the vicar remonstrates with me for being improperly dressed, I can reply ‘Well, half the people in this building are dressed for a pantomime. Why shouldn’t I?’

But now I’ll tell you what’s odd (and this is a big admission): Just occasionally – and the reasons are many and varied but unimportant for the purpose of the post – I experience an image in which I’m standing at the front of the church watching a young woman in white finery walking slowly up the aisle on the arm of her father. And you know what? I come close to feeling emotional.

Now why should that be, I always ask myself. I really don’t know. Maybe it’s because I never saw such an image from that angle, nor ever provided support for any bride. Maybe it’s just a feeling of having missed out on something in the torturous path we call a life. Then again, it might be my incorrigibly Romantic predilection regarding the search for the Holy Grail manifesting itself again. Maybe the Holy Grail is a woman in a white dress. (Nobody knows what the Holy Grail is, or was, you know, because Chretien de Troyes died before he finished the story. All that stuff about it being the cup from which Jesus drank at the last supper, or the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea collected Jesus's  blood during the crucifixion, are just guesses. It's a curious fact about human nature that if somebody writes a guess into a book and enough people read it, before long it becomes accepted as established fact. Religions are full of that sort of thing.)

And now I’m going to stick my courage to the sticking place and post a picture which at one time I found difficult to look at. I’m not going to say who the happy couple are because that would be breaching a confidence, but I hope you’ll agree that the Woman in White is worth feeling close to emotional about. (And I hope nobody objects to the breach of copyright. I'm not rich enough to bother suing me.)