The art of self-awareness
On Saturday I attended a family wedding in the Midlands. Only it turned out when we arrived that it wasn’t actually a wedding because that had taken place at least a week beforehand. What we had actually been invited to [billed as a ‘Ceremony and Celebration’] might best be termed a summer garden part in the old style, featuring a large twin-marquee, various side-tents (offering ‘rest’, ‘fizz’, ‘eats’ and ice cream), a mobile toilet block and areas of the vast lawn set aside for croquet, boules, ‘throwing the welly’ and other games of mysterious nature which I did not feel inclined to attempt.
I would also note in passing that, according to the substantial blackboard notice detailing what we were about to experience as we approached the ‘business area’, the large twin-marque was in fact in the style of a large Red Indian twin ‘teepee’ – as we originally used to spell it in the days of Champion The Wonder Horse and The Lone Ranger, but now spelled as ‘tipis’. With my natural capacity for quick-fire repartee in social situations, I was able to amuse the first three or four gatherings of standing guests that I joined with the gag that, when I had read that at the garden gate, I had assumed that we were about to be offered – as forms of canape – some new form of exotic stuffed tapas.
The only aspect of the event that wasn’t quite perfect was the one that nobody could possibly have controlled. I guess that’s the risk with mounting a large summer party in the second half of September in the East Midlands. The weather was vaguely dull and overcast, with a chill wind blowing. Perhaps inevitably, when we returned yesterday to the same venue for a thirty-plus Sunday lunch, the atmosphere was airless and the sun was blazing, so much so that several people took to wearing hats or caps and some even opted to decamp from the enormous refectory table set on the grass to find respite somewhere in the shade.
But back momentarily to Saturday’s event. The ‘ceremony’ consisted of a lady conducting what I took to be a non-religious, or even pagan, service which the innocent (and possibly elderly and/or traditionalist) present might have taken to be the wedding as advertised, but which those of us with insider knowledge immediately recognised was not the real deal. At one point it featured the celebrant tying strands of multi-coloured string around one of each the newly-weds’ wrists to ‘bind them together’ adding with a knowing smile “that in the olden days” the newly-joined were required to remain thus bound for a year and a day.
At least that is what I think she told us. Even though I was sitting in the fourth row of the benches arranged on the right hand side of what in a church would have been an aisle, I could make out barely a word of what was being said because the wind was sufficiently strong, the tree branches rustling sufficiently near and nobody had thought to prepare for everything by providing any form of microphone or amplification. Well, I suppose you cannot think of everything.
I sensed in advance that I would thoroughly enjoy the weekend – knowing as I did so many of those involved so well – and in that respect was not disappointed.
One aspect that slightly shocked me (or was it perhaps made me stop and think?) was the experience of catching up with two of my semi-distant relations of the generation after mine whom I had not seen or spent a great deal of time with in the past decade.
Looking back, one feature of my experience of being a parent was how – possibly this is a male thing, or just my personality type – I tended to ‘fix’ either/both of my children as being say the age of six or eight … and thereafter to treat them as being of that age unless and until some event (or perhaps conversation with them) took place which caused me overnight to recalibrate and ‘register’ them as being say nine, or eleven, or even thirteen years of age. Thus over time my relationship with my kids proceeded in a series of similar ‘jumps’ until I finally recognised them as being genuine adult human beings (and, if you like, equals) somewhere between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one.
On Saturday I found myself in separate conversations with ‘once or twice removed’ relations of mine now aged about thirty whom I hadn’t seen properly in ages.
The first had been ‘registered’ in my mind for about the past twelve years as a ‘goth’ – if you can imagine a male about about 6 feet 2 inches tall, wearing uniformly black clothing (chains emerging from back pockets), elaborately-bound black boots, earings and possibly even a nose studs, topped with a red-died Mohican hairstyle. Said individual had metamorphosed into a bright, bushy-tailed, 6 feet 2 inch, switched on, young businessman with slicked back hair (and a young son aged about four in tow) who introduced himself to me with a smile as “newly-divorced and yes, still sore about it, but now coming out the other side and very happy, thank you …”.
The other, as I remembered him, was a hell of a worry to his parents – terminally surly, apparently disinterested in life as the rest of the world knew it, academically-troubled and apparently surely destined for a life going nowhere. He turned out to be now living on the continent, running his own business, renting out properties and about to take a year out to go travelling and seek new business opportunities around the world. Again, he plainly now had direction and ambition in his life and was a most interesting character.
Not for the first time I experienced a certain feeling of wonder. Whereas I have spent the bulk of the past sixty years permanently youthful of mind and vaguely wondering what I was going to end up doing one day when I finally grew up, these days I keep meeting people of the younger generation who once used to think exactly like me but have since matured into proper adults making their way in the world.
At times like this, I cannot help myself wondering whether perhaps I’ve got it badly wrong in my approach to life – or, alternatively, whether everyone else has …
