11:45am Tuesday 19th May 2009
By Alan Molineaux
We had the pleasure of attending a wedding at the weekend. There was a time when the beauty of these events passed me by in a haze of young adult distractions.
These days, however, I am quite taken by the whole thing. I admit to having a tear in my eye when the bride walked down the aisle, and I actually listened to the vows; trying to understand their place in our post-modern world.
Perhaps the passage of time has softened this middle-aged rugby-playing northerner.
This was the marriage of one of our dearest friend’s daughters, therefore Mrs M and I met up with a lot of old friends that we hadn’t seen for many years.
Such occurrences alone, I believe, have an interesting effect upon the soul of a man. You are faced with people who look more like their parents than their former selves.
There was Bob who first taught me to play guitar, who now has four children and runs his own business in Derbyshire. We chatted for a while about old instruments that we owned, realising that had we kept them, they would have been worth a decent amount of money.
Another old friend was Paul: a man with whom I’d been on a youth camping holiday in 1975. Fifty teenagers in a field in North Wales; we played sport, tried to stay dry, and worked hard at avoiding our turn on washing-up duty.
Back then we were 15, and wore clothes that have been back in fashion several times since. I think I bumped into him on and off over the next couple of years, but not once in the following three decades.
When we met again at the weekend, we both seemed to have the same thoughts rushing through our heads. It was a mixture of pleasure at meeting again and shock at how old we both obviously looked. We approached with a handshake that turned into one of those odd man-hugs where you pat each other in a no-nonsense kind of way.
We chatted for a while, exchanging stories about our respective families and work lives, then went off to enjoy the rest of the wedding.
There were no other words needed because, after all, we didn’t really know each other that well. We both, however, know that we marked a nostalgic moment; we had lived through 1975 and came out the other side, with flared trousers, cheesecloth shirts and bad haircuts.
We were now in our late forties and, with less hair and more wrinkles, we were both glad to have met again.
I was moved by the bride’s arrival because she represented the hope of a newly-developing relationship. I marvelled at the vows because I was pleased that such ancient ideas were still being seen as valuable.
And I enjoyed meeting old friends as it reminded me that, in a world that thinks middle-aged people are invisible, we were young once and youth was wasted on us too.
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