Learn more about what makes Proton Mail different (new window). But there are no great expectations, and that’s exactly what we wanted.Congratulations on joining the Proton community! Proton Mail (new window) is an ad-free email service that safeguards your personal conversations with strong encryption. As it happens, we live in Camberwell Green. We’re having a big party in a barn in a fortnight, which you should all join, if you can find it, but next week it’s a low-key ceremony a bouquet’s throw from home, then a pleasant little tavern or three, and out into the same nefarious streets Dickens traipsed. That’s what we’ll be doing, when we get married next Saturday. You’ve sent us instructions to move to Moscow, take Russian citizenship, run for political office or join the military, because you’ve fallen for that massive room Putin always bollocks his generals in, and can’t find it on .uk? Thank you for including us we will not be doing that.ĭo exactly what you want, I say. You’re planning on doing it in Bikini Bottom, the undersea city where SpongeBob and his friends live, as the vibe seems super chill? It’s fictional, but fair, that’s definitely a first among our uni group. You’re tying the knot in Ulaanbaatar, for no reason, and are now basically daring your friends to join? You do you, see you after. I respect the chutzpah: for years, weddings followed a strict tradition, largely directed by the parents, and that resulted all too often in drab, identikit affairs – and probably contributed to a few affairs of the other, less drab, kind, too. I can’t say it’s always my immediate reaction, when a hand-addressed envelope plops on to the doormat and I pick it up and unfurl the seven pages of neatly bound, wildflower-laced, diamanté-embossed, Miss Dior-infused, FAQ-laden khadi paper, then squint through rococo calligraphy to decipher that ‘Poppy and Ryan appreciate all too well that it is a teensy bit of a faff to get there, but it would be the honour of their lives if *INSERT NAMES HERE*, as two of their 163 closest confidantes, joined them to celebrate their marriage at the Four Seasons on Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, in July of next year…’ – but I quite admire couples who dare to do precisely what they want with their wedding day. Who’s perfect?īut weddings are a starting point, not an end that swallows all your savings. I realise Dickens depicts Wemmick as a social misfit, his bride as absurd, the aged parent as risible if vulnerable and Pip as only halfway through discovering that he could be foolishly unkind. They expected a small tip, perhaps a bigger one at a wedding.Īnyway, Wemmick’s wedding, with a walk for a mile or so afterwards, with the fishing rod still in play, to ‘a pleasant little tavern’ for lunch (or wedding breakfast, as we called it within living memory) – just the four of them, I suppose, the pew-opener having returned to her duties of dusting and keeping an eye open – well, it seems ideal. Pew-openers held a lowly place in the ecology of churches in the days when parishioners paid an annual rent, against all provisions of law, for a regular pew. She is given away by the aged parent, the witnesses being Pip and ‘a little limp pew-opener in a soft bonnet like a baby’s’. Leaving the rod in the porch he goes in, finding a pair of kid gloves in his pocket and his fiancée in the aisle.
Wemmick goes for a walk one morning with the grown-up Pip, with a fishing rod over his shoulder as public explanation, if any were needed, for his venturing as far as Camberwell Green, where he suddenly exclaims: ‘Halloa! Here’s a church!’ My ideal wedding is Mr Wemmick’s in Great Expectations – you know, the clerk with an aged parent living in a wooden cottage fitted with a cannon among the back lanes, ditches, and little gardens of Walworth, south of the Thames. The car-hire office is closed and the key-safe at the Airbnb refuses the code.
The upshot is an even more expensive, crowded wedding in a strange place, where leaving the aeroplane is like opening the oven door, and the change in the clock makes everyone fractious before they do anything. But now friends of the happy couple will go to Magaluf for a hen party or Prague for a stag party, let alone a wedding. People used to get married abroad to avoid the expense of having too many guests.
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