My best friends wedding - Module 2:

Part4… Choosing the wedding dress

OK we have a chocolate and pink template but not much else. So we kick off with the wedding dress shopping experience. My God, with all the inherent drama, it should be a reality TV programme on Channel 5.

I am under no illusions that helping to choose Marina’s wedding dress would be as Austin put it, an episode. I can say this with authority as I clearly recall about four years ago, the saga of going with M to buy an evening dress. She’d just started going out with Phil and he’d asked her to his firm’s black tie affair in the City. I remember nearly collapsing in Selfridges with sheer exhaustion as we tried on yet another little black number.

Going shopping with Marina was always difficult. I recall endless trying on of clothes on Saturdays in Top Shop before it gained the street cred of being a sanctuary for the MABYS (middle aged but youthful) brigade. We started off well, but it always turned ugly.

Armed with experience, hindsight and insider information, I have taken measures. No wedding dress shopping on a Saturday, Marina gets stressed in a crowd, and gets worked up if anyone looks better than her in the changing room. So we’re off shopping on a Tuesday!

With instructions from me, M is wearing seam-free pants and a multi-way flesh coloured bra obviously with clothes over the top, I hasten to add. Until we’ve chosen the dress, we’re not sure what underwear to go for, so with our ‘universal’ lingerie, we’ve at least got some idea of what the dress infrastructure needs to be like.

It’s also just after 9.00am in the morning and we’re meeting at my favourite greasy spoon. Marina and her mum are on this organic juice diet so that they look their best on the day. I try to persuade them that for this type of endeavour organic isn’t going to work.
No, Serious bodice lacing and under skirt hooping requires pig fat, fried eggs, fried bread, tinned plum tomatoes and a double helping of mushrooms, all washed down with builder’s tea.
It doesn’t work. I trough out while they have a demure egg on toast. However, we’re all satisfied and by 10.15am we enter our first bridal boutique full of trucker’s breakfast and hope…..