The Ice-Cream Bell Rings

Weddings are occasions I avoid. Not that I ever harbor any ill feelings towards the to-be married couples, it is just the thought of having to provide an account of your life in the past few years to old school mates, ex-boy/girlfriends, acquaintances of friends etc. Lives touch, which otherwise were meant to remain separate...Contrary to the spirit of weddings and unions, of course.

Last Saturday was not a wedding I could avoid. He was a dear friend from university and, I confess, there was the lure of seeing the Church of St Mary of the Angels. As it turned out, it was a pretty solemn wedding, and WOHA's strangely medieval architecture (despite the contemporary, voluminous hall) only added to it. At the door, I discovered that a couple of old friends from university are now separated. It didn't seem so long ago that I had helped take photographs at their wedding. Familiar faces who have put on a kilogram or 5 have also acquired toddlers and cars and toddlers and pearls and cardigans and - have I already said toddlers? All this was a little too predictable, no? So when the ice-cream man the couple had hired for the reception started to ring his bell, I couldn't wait to get out of its hearing range.



"How we have grown up!" I only wished that this could be exclaimed with a different wonder.