The Shirt I Wore on our Wedding-Day

I’m wearing the shirt I wore on our wedding-day. It’s an oxford-weave cotton dress-shirt with a button-down collar, in an ivoryish offwhite colour, which I wore on that day under a navy-blue YSL double-breasted suit, and a blue-&-gold tie. I had a new pair of shiny black shoes on my feet. My buttonhole was an ivory rose.

I put on the shirt and the rest of the ensemble at my mother’s house, where I readied myself with my bride’s father; with Mr A____, my sister’s husband and my best man; and with Mr L_______, my mother’s boyfriend. The bride, meanwhile, made her preparations at my sister’s place, fifteen miles or so down the road.

My love and I were wedded, four years ago to the day, in a civil ceremony performed in an airy 18th-century room. We sipped champagne between kisses in a stretch limo en-route to the reception. We chatted with allcomers and opened gifts in the bar. We decanted oursleves to the function room, a converted mediæval barn, and ate and drank and drank some more, and listened to speeches and toasts, and cut the cake, and, later, there was music, and dancing.

I took the shirt off again after fourteen hours had elapsed and almost three bottles of champagne consumed, before climbing into a bath and then bed in our suite at the golf & country club where the reception had been held, and was indeed still being continued in our absence by our more diehard guests. In another sense, though, I never took the shirt off at all, and have been wearing it ever since, every day for four years, the marriage-shirt. It is comfortable and warm, and an excellent fit. I feel that it suits me, becomes me.

Posted by misteraitch at October 16, 2003 10:48 AM | TrackBack