I once attended a wedding in which military thunderflashes attached by rogue ushers to the rear of the going-away car detonated and blew the tights off a mother-in-law. At other nuptials, the uncle of a friend of mine died as he escorted his daughter up the aisle - something borrowed, something new, something turning fairly blue, as they say. Such are the vicissitudes and dramas that can afflict the English summer wedding season. Hell, I have seen an overweight bride reveal her leg and garter for the photograph, only to pitch forward when a guest stood on her dress and collapse onto a wheelchair-bound relative. Eat your heart out Miranda.
There is nothing quite like it. The hopes and joys and fears and promise, the comedy of errors and clash of class, the mix of characters and range of emotion, the execrable speeches and appalling dancing and the potential for calamitous farce. I mean, I have been at weddings where the pageboys have torn the train off the bride or run in front of the wedding-party yelling 'squashed tomatoes to you'; I have seen bridesmaids tower over the bride and on account of their headgear resemble escapees from a nativity play; I have even been part of a congregation convulsed with laughter at a reading that instructed a good wife to go out at dawn and plant vines (the idea of this particular bride rising before midday to do anything was absurd).
Maybe in middle-age, the weddings are more sedate. In younger days, misbehaviour was rife. A friend was once so drunk, he fell across and demolished the cake; another somehow managed to gather speed as he entered the tent down a ramp and ended sprawled across tables laden with glasses and bottles of champagne. Then there was the dangerous and unpredictable sport of marquee-sliding in which the tent became a makeshift toboggan-run: I recall an acquaintance dropping in unexpectedly on proceedings when he fell through the ceiling and landed below on the speaker-stack. On a separate occasion, at the bottom of his descent, a participant succeeded in impaling himself on the peg of a guy-rope and was carried off in an ambulance. Happy days.
And let us not forget those who have half-drowned themselves in ponds, been caught in flagrante, or vomited uncontrollably on one of the newlyweds. It is privilege that tends to lend such behaviour a veneer of legitimacy, that transforms it from mere hooliganism to noble high-jinks. My own sins - swallow-diving inebriated into a ha-ha, swimming in a pool in my morning-suit tails (and little else), and walking into a hedge and exclaiming 'well, that's the only bush I'll be eating this evening' (I did not realise a member of the royal family was within earshot) - appear minor by comparison.
Of course, the older generation are not immune to the occasional lapse. I remember one old girl, resplendent in her evening jewels, slipping drunk at my feet beneath the table with the words: 'Pay no attention, my dear'. At one wedding, an elderly gentleman sitting close to me on a pew, surveyed the big-boned bride making her way from the altar and exclaimed in a stage-whisper: 'I only have one word to say - oink...'.
Weddings would be the poorer without this unscripted fusion of drama and mishap, without the individual vignettes, without the odd Chinese lantern floating romantically into the air and setting fire to a tree or the family home beyond. The schizophrenic brother of a friend who was getting married did actually whisper in my ear that his voices were telling him the church was about to burn down. Difficult to know what to do. Hard also to prevent the sniggering at the revelation of a ridiculous and hitherto-kept secret middle name: trust me, Bigus Dickus of The Life of Brian has nothing on some of them. And all this after the organist has fallen asleep and unleashed a crashing chord with his forehead, after the mud-spattered congregation have waded through a quagmire to a church or succeeded in wiping the cowpats off their feet and onto the hassocks.
In truth, Four Weddings And a Funeral captured a certain kind of English wedding with toe-curling aplomb. I mean, on one day in June - a Saturday when everyone appeared to be getting hitched and marquees sprouted across the Home Counties - I blithely grazed on canapés and quaffed champagne at several different receptions before realising I knew neither bride nor groom and was forced onward to find my destination. Then there are the embarrassing encounters in the wayside pubs beforehand, the weeping bridesmaids, the jilted ex-lovers, the overheard conversations of venom and snobbery. Only in England.
But I would not change a thing. So let us celebrate the institution, embrace the day, revel in the music and the beauty of the text. And remember, funerals too contain their own hidden gems. Yes, I have witnessed a mourner sliding into an open grave.