WEDDING GOSSIP Girl in a White Dress 18 10925 views

Our resident bride and wedding expert, Cheryl, is back from her big day and floating on a wedding-induced cloud of loveliness, and will be talking weddings with you every week...

Looking back...

Hindsight is a wonderful clever thing – but only if you can use it at the time of whatever you’re doing. It’s no good looking back and going ‘if only we’d done it that way perhaps the goldfish might have survived’.

Weddings are a bit like that. If you ask any newly-bride if, looking back, she’d do anything differently, most would come over all misty-eyed and say, no, it was exactly as we wanted it to be. Which is lovely and how it should be. But what if it wasn’t exactly as you wanted it to be? Obviously there’s no going back and doing it all again (oh, I wish, I wish) as it’s financially out of the question (for us anyway) and friends might look at you a bit oddly if you announced another wedding date only weeks after the original one.

But I have spoken to a few brides who would have changed certain elements of their day – for example, one newly-bride who shall remain nameless told me that in hindsight she probably wouldn’t have invited her mother’s work friends as they ended up enjoying rather too much of the free-flowing wine and got into a big argument with another guest during the speeches, causing the groom’s father to ‘shush’ them in a stern, headmastery way.

And on our wedding day a few small things went a bit differently than we’d imagined. For example, the hairdresser was an hour late, so while I’d factored in lots of time to do make-up and get into the dress (a task in itself that took about half an hour), I suddenly found myself with 10 minutes to slap on some foundation and yank my dress on.
But of course on the day you smile and go with it, because it’s still going to be the most amazing day of your life regardless of who was there, or who was late, or who didn’t know how to get to the town hall (my driver for one). There are so many elements to the day that it’s virtually impossible to make sure they all go according to plan. So as I learnt, it’s best just to sit back and go with the ride. You’ll have a wonderful day and small hiccups will either be funny anecdotes to tell your children, or you’ll forget about them altogether. But the most important thing is just to enjoy yourself.

So, until next week, I'll be trying to forget that the buttonholes at our wedding weren't quite the right colour because I'm probably the only one who even noticed!

Photos © Benjamin Earwicker / iStockphoto