A Beautiful Day for a Wedding: This year’s Bridget Jones!. Charlotte Butterfield

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СКАЧАТЬ point in someone’s life rather than their lowest. Writing features with headlines like Blooming lovely, or Love at first blush certainly beat ones like My nephew is also my uncle or Why our 50-year age gap doesn’t matter.

       Hi Eve!

       I’m torn between wanting a French manicure for my day or a dusky pink to match the roses in my bouquet and the bridesmaid dresses. My mum thinks that a pink will be better, but I’m worried it might chip and look more obvious? At least if a French manicure chips, you can’t really see it. What should I do?

       Thanks,

       Helen, Staffordshire.

      Eve was only meant to select the best five emails for the monthly Q&A page and to ignore the rest. Print-worthy, this one was not, but as she could sense the desperation in Helen from Staffordshire’s email, Eve replied nonetheless.

       Hi Helen,

       Firstly, congratulations on your big day, and well done for choosing such an on-trend colour for your wedding, dusky pink is a timeless choice. The best solution would be to wear the pink varnish and ask one of your bridesmaids to carry a spare bottle of the matching colour in their clutch bag to solve any chipping disasters.

       Enjoy your day!

       Eve xx

      It wasn’t strictly what she was paid to do, and Eve knew that her editor, Fiona, wouldn’t approve of her taking time out of her working day to personally reply, but it had taken all of fifteen seconds to stop Helen from Staffordshire losing any more sleep.

      Eve’s phone buzzed again. It was another university friend, Ayesha, who was getting married a month after Tanya. ‘Babe, where can I buy lawn flamingoes?’

      Eve looked heavenward. ‘Lawn what?’

      ‘Flamingoes.’

      ‘That’s what I thought you said. What are lawn flamingoes?’

      ‘You know, big sculptures of flamingoes that stand on your lawn. I thought it would be really nice to have one for everyone coming to the wedding and you have to find the one with your name on it and it’s got your table number on it too.’

      Eve had to take a deliberately slow breath in before replying in case an expletive slipped out. ‘Um, Ayesha. I thought the theme for your wedding was The Wizard of Oz? At what point in the film were there flamingoes?’

      Ayesha laughed. ‘Oh, there weren’t silly, I just really really love flamingoes, and I thought that getting lots of dwarves to stand on the lawn dressed like Munchkins might be in really poor taste. Unless you don’t think so?’

      Not for the first time, Eve questioned her choice in friends.

      ‘You’re too nice.’ Kat remarked as soon as Eve had put down the phone. ‘If I said yes every time one of my friends asked me to help them with their weddings, I’d never have time for anything else.’

      ‘Welcome to my world,’ Eve muttered.

      ‘How many weddings do you have again this summer?’

      ‘Five.’ Eve pointed to the noticeboard that hung on the wall above her desk, which was crammed with save the dates, invitations and gift list registry cards. A couple, like Tanya’s, were classically white with embossed words while others, like Ayesha’s, were colourful and contemporary. Regardless of their style or size of swirly writing, all Eve could see when she glanced at them was the potential of stress and financial ruin.

      ‘Five? That’s insane.’

      ‘But it’s not just the weddings is it? It’s all the hen dos and rehearsals, I literally have one free weekend between now and the end of August.’

      ‘Eve, they’re not your weddings though, you are allowed to have fun outside of being chief wedding planner you know. Look at you, you’re gorgeous, in a very English sort of way, with your long red hair and alabaster skin—’

      ‘You can tell you’re a beauty journalist,’ Eve interrupted. ‘I’m pale and freckly.’

      ‘And interesting. You’re young, and you’re wasting the summer by being at the beck and call of people who have already found their other halves.’

      ‘Cheers.’

      ‘I’m serious!’ Kat said, emphasising how serious she was by waving a lipstick in Eve’s face. ‘How long have we worked together now?’

      ‘Two years.’

      ‘Two years. And in those two years, how many boyfriends have you had? You’re never going to find someone if you don’t put yourself out there.’

      What was the opposite of rose-tinted, Eve wondered, because it was exactly the same any time a friend of hers became coupled-up; they looked back on their solo days with hand-on-heart relief that they had dragged themselves out of the cesspool of single life.

      ‘See, that’s the difference Kat, it barely crosses my mind to look for a boyfriend, let alone “put myself out there!”’ Eve shuddered. ‘When the time is right, he’ll just turn up.’

      ‘Eve, Eve, Eve,’ Kat shook her head the way you would to a child that’s put their left shoe on their right foot for the fortieth time. ‘Finding a partner requires a massive amount of effort, he doesn’t just “turn up”. Have you learnt nothing from writing about weddings?’

      Kat had a point. It always amazed Eve how much effort some of the brides, and some grooms too, had put into finding someone to marry. If she’d had the job of interviewing couples twenty or thirty years ago about how they met, the stories would have invariably included the words ‘school’, ‘pub’, or ‘nightclub’, but nowadays the hoops that brides jumped through to get to the altar were staggering.

      ‘I like being single,’ Eve said. ‘Anyway, I am far too busy.’

      ‘It’s just that in the two years I’ve known you, you’ve never had anyone special in your life, and you’re pretty cool so I just wonder why, that’s all.’ Kat started putting the lipsticks away in their boxes. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

      ‘There’s no big mystery, Kat. I really liked someone once, and I’m just waiting to meet another person that I like as much, that’s all.’

      ‘So, what happened to him?’

      Eve used the time it took to sweep all her paperclips into her hand and pour them back into their pot to think of an answer that was completely devoid of sentiment. There was no point getting upset about it after all this time. She settled on, ‘I honestly have no idea.’ Which, as it happened, was completely true.

       Chapter 2

       The wedding with the wizards

      There weren’t many СКАЧАТЬ