WEDDING BELLE Blues

Marrying couples can involve handling all sorts of hiccups.

- MAGGY WHITEHOUSE

I’d been driving for five hours toward my destination in the Czech Republic when the road petered out. There was nothing ahead but a dirt track and construction vehicles. No one had informed my satellite navigation system, so I was totally convinced that the nonexistent way ahead was just the ticket and no possible alternatives existed.

I phoned the couple I was scheduled to marry for help, but they were out of signal range and a call to the bride’s home revealed that her family’s grasp of English was as limited as my knowledge of Czech. Thank God for texts! I found a village with a café, and four hours later, the groom (a personal friend) arrived. He was a British Sikh who was marrying a Czech Catholic, and his language problem was the same as mine. Courteous but tight-lipped with stress, he said he and his fiancée had had one hell of a day trying to get some essential last-minute documentation for the marriage to be valid. She’d forgotten to register him as a resident in the Czech Republic, which was essential, and tempers had understandably flared.

Once safely at the bride’s house, I sat the couple down and asked the nowadays time-honored prewedding question: “Just how much do you hate each other right now?”

“Oh so, so very much,” they replied in unison before bursting into laughter at the relief of being able to admit that all the wedding organization had been driving them crazy.

I spent most of that evening going through their unique ceremony with the Czech interpreter who would be translating while I married them; we did a good job, but it all went to hell in a handcart 30 minutes before the ceremony itself when the bride asked if I could take all mention of God out of the service so as not to upset her Auntie Flavia.