No, not mine but, I finally got invited to an Irish wedding. And please do not pay attention to the malevolent rumours, spread by my same better half, that I actually coerced our way to the wedding. What I did was simply and casually, but quite warmly, express my long-term desire to wear a ceremonial hat to the groom. I suppose the fact that the travelling husband is the one deciding his bonus every year did the rest. A girl gotta do what a girl gotta do, right?!

Anyway, enough of unimportant details and let’s go back to the real purpose of my machinations. The Hat.

Did I wear it in the end? No. When I finally got my hand on the one perfectly matching my dress, in fact, and slipped my head into it, it was simply too much, but a fascinator looked too little. Disappointed, I asked the Alphabet Ladies ( and this reminds me that I need to write a post about them sooner or later), and they suggested a hatinator.

I must confess my total ignorance here. What in hell is a hatinator? It certainly doesn’t sound like anything I would like to put on my head and show myself in public with. It sounds painful too. It turned out it’s a simple miniature hat, and I have plenty at home from the Halloween costumes or the Megacoms. Surely not suitable for a wedding, but at least now we know what they are properly called. In the end, the hatinator was not the solution either. Not that I haven’t tried hard. I went around for a month to find the perfect shape in the perfect colour, but perfection is not of this world!

Then when I was nearly giving up, the perfect hair accessory came to me. I was browsing around the various vintage shops in town, and there it was: a mid-twenties hair clip of diamonds and pearls. The perfect match for my shoe brooches, my handbag, and the perfect accessory to make my short bob very, very Mrs Fisher.

Back to the clip, I absolutely loved it; it was simply ME. That kind of love and the many compliments I got for it also gave me the strength to wear it for nearly 12 hours straight. Yes, because the bloody thing wasn’t just big; it was as heavy as a bag of potatoes. I had to take numerous bathroom breaks just to remove it for a few minutes. If anyone paid attention to my back-and-forth to the toilet, they might have thought my middle-aged woman bladder was really behaving at its worst. It was worth it, though, and as my mother used to tell me while mercilessly brushing the knots in my hair: “Se bella vuoi appraise, un pochino devi soffrire” ( if you want to be beautiful, you must suffer a little); that is also most likely the reason why I had long hair only for a brief, and very painful, time in my life.

Well, I suppose now you want to hear about the wedding too. The groom and bride were so sweet and beyond happy, and the place was magnificent, and I finally got to spend a night in a country house where every room has an old-fashioned big key, canopy beds and supposedly a ghost. Ours must have been scared away by the travelling husband’s heavy snoring. It was indeed a very nice wedding, and it could have been great if only they hadn’t let us starve for four hours between the end of the ceremony and dinner. Also, the DJ couldn’t have been helped. It was not as bad as the one in Love Actually, but dangerously close.

Then there was a curious recurrence. Every time I went to the bathroom, and we know I went quite a lot, the bridesmaids were gossiping in front of the mirror, and the bride participating from inside a cubicle. I could spot her dress coming out from under the cubicle door like a huge white blob.

She was going to the bathroom a lot too.

I had three guesses: one, her bladder is far older than it goes by; two, the leek soup was already acting on her tummy ( that’s another thing; whoever did the menu didnt think about the unpleasantness of the side effect of leek, especially on your first night as groom and bride); three, she needed a break from her dress too. If my hair clip was heavy, her dress was far heavier. I know because I stepped on it a few times, and she wouldn’t even notice; instead, she dragged me along. It was like being on a flying rug. Thankfully, after the first dance, when the real disco music kicked in, she had a backup dress.

And yes, you heard me: disco music. Now feel free to picture the travelling husband losing himself on the dance floor… or not.

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