For years I would rather eat my own hand than go to a wedding. Something to do with hippie ideals and an abhorrence of official documents. Then I joined the human race and started going to those weddings where the best man's speech includes a plea for every man with a key to the bride's flat to bring them up to the table right now. Hilarious. I almost went back to being a hippie again.
I have just been to a wedding in Central Otago, which I am sure was splendid. But I wrote this before I went so I could honestly say to everyone there, no, I am not writing about the wedding, you can drink all you want. Why would anyone write about a wedding?
My own wedding in 1975 was a strange and surrealistic affair, about which I often wake in the night with wild staring eyes. I was technically living with my wife-to-be in 1974 when her mother said she was coming down for a visit, so it was suggested we get technically engaged to offset the degree of venial sin we had been indulging in by going to the supermarket together. The mother-in-law scheduled the wedding immediately and everything was booked before I could even say tally ho. I would be married in Christchurch.
This would make it difficult for me to organise suitable bands who played psychedelic music at shattering volume, but my wife's mother solved that problem by booking the band who had played at her post office do the previous Christmas. They were really good, she said, and they're available. The band certainly knew their craft. I have rarely heard Beautiful Sunday, Candida and Tie A Yellow Ribbon To The Old Oak Tree sung with such verve. My brother, however, steeped in heavy metal - he cleaned his teeth every morning to Smoke On The Water - decided we needed to dance to something with more balls, and wrested the microphone from the band's singer to do some Elvis.
I was outside playing frisbee at the time. I still felt I was a hippie and a pink fluorescent frisbee was the first thing I packed when we left Dunedin. Besides, I had friends who had flown down especially from Auckland.
Frisbee was their only skill. I couldn't disappoint them. We played after it got dark. All-nighter revelry while riding the cosmos at Sandfly Bay had taught us all to sense the exact location of a frisbee by its almost inaudible hum. It was totally black out there and nobody dropped a single throw. Did I mention I wore brown velvet and my wife Romanian cheesecloth?
My best man had assured me the day before that Southern Comfort was the only drink that could be consumed heavily without dog-ass drunkenness resulting. He was right. We drank right through the night and through the bulk of the wedding day and solved pretty much all of the world and our own problems in that time, often remarking how much smarter we had become since school. I arrived at the wedding at four in the afternoon in a serene state that many compared to Gandhi, and dealt effortlessly with every demand, working the room like a pro. The astronomical blood-alcohol level only interfered with one thing, my speech, this having to follow an incomprehensible sustained metaphor about horse-racing - favourites, off-course substitute, quinellas and coming down on the outside - from a dear friend of the family. Probably a brilliant speech, but it rendered me mute.
Our wedding night was in a Riccarton Rd motel. Nobody wrote on our car or tied noisy things to the bumper. We had bacon and eggs for breakfast.
We have a Viewmaster slide reel of the event, which is weird and lovely and frozen and special. Every time I find it in a drawer, I watch it over and over, thinking, as I click round the circular disc one more time, that I might find more pictures. Even just one. But I never do.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
