I read a story the other day about a woman in America who was arrested for shoplifting. The woman had stolen a tin of peaches and in court the judge asked the woman why she did it.

“Because I was hungry,” she said.

The judge paused for a moment of reflection and then he asked the store manager how many peaches were in the tin. 

“Usually six,” came the reply.

The judge said that he was inclined to make the punishment fit the crime and that therefore six days in prison might be appropriate. The woman’s husband was visibly moved by this and asked to say a few words on her behalf.

“You say you want the punishment to fit the crime and that six days is the right punishment for stealing six peaches,” he began. “However I’m pretty sure she took a tin of peas as well.”

I shared that one with Tracey the other night, but she didn’t laugh. It’s a joke from another era in which comedy gave us henpecked husbands and monster mother in-laws, and Scottish weddings where the confetti was on elastic.  It’s the casual twentieth wedding anniversary gag about getting fewer years for bank robbery; it’s cynical supposedly knowing references to marriage as a test of endurance as in the three rings: engagement ring, wedding ring and suffering; it’s the one about marrying Miss Right but not realising her first name is Always, and so maybe it’s not appropriate in the week my big brother Nigel got married, but I still think it’s a pretty good joke.

It occurred to me whilst attending Nigel and Lynne’s wedding that getting married is a fabulously uncynical thing to do. Two people tell each other they’re so fantastic they want to stay together for the rest of their lives and commit to doing just that whilst friends and family grin like someone’s taking lots of photographs, usually because someone is taking lots of photographs.

Lynne and Nigel’s wedding service was memorable. There was some great singing from the choir Nigel is a part of, I delivered the address, which was made immediately better by my decision to ditch a couple of jokes as I went along, and there were no major mishaps. My favourite wedding mishap ever was shared years ago by a former Bishop of Birkenhead who revealed that in one of the first weddings at which he ever officiated, he managed to forget the groom’s name even though the couple were members of the church where he was stationed. Nerves can do that to you. He didn’t want to admit this so he tried to work it into the liturgy, which proved a bad idea.

“In what name do you come to be married this day?” he asked the groom, in his best, most pompous vicar voice.

The groom looked at him blankly and then thought he’d got it, and responded with “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

There was nothing on this scale at Nigel and Lynne’s wedding, though there was a moment where the minister leaned forward whilst the rings were sitting on the Bible and the rings attempted to elope down the aisle. Nigel and Lynne chased and captured them and as he picked his ring up Nigel grinned and said “Something like that had to happen,” and that’s when I realised that he was really enjoying the experience and was in the moment.

Looking back, I suspect I was less in the moment on the day I got married than was the case with Nigel and Lynne. People think of Nigel as the shy one and me as the talky one, but I am not the biggest fan of big gatherings and my recollection of my own wedding day is of lots of people looking at me whilst I was saying some deeply personal stuff. Tracey, I know, feels the same way, though she did manage a particularly memorable quip whilst signing the marriage register when, with pen hovering over the book she said, “I couldn’t do this in pencil could I?” We had a great wedding day, and I was taken back to it this week when cousin David sent me a picture of himself with Jasmine at the Showroom Cinema where we had our reception, but I recall I didn’t entirely relax until late in the evening when most of the guests had gone home and we were in Pizza Express having our suppers.

Nigel and Lynne’s wedding was a more extrovert occasion in some ways, with songs and actual dancing. Uncle Norman reportedly could hardly believe that Nigel could dance that way but dance he and Lynne did. There was singing and dancing and chocolate pudding; there were sparklers lighting the night sky; there was so much emotion even the cake was in tiers; and there was Nigel and Lynne in the moment, looking like they were living out the words I used in my address:

Dance like nobody’s watching; 

love like you’ve never been hurt. 

Sing like nobody’s listening; 

live like it’s heaven on earth.

So maybe I need to ditch the cynicism of those opening jokes about marriage and go for something less funny but full of hopeful possibilities, something that was what last Saturday was really all about.

Did you hear the one about the couple who promised to stay together ‘until parted by death’?

They did. And they were happy.

May it be so!