notjustaboutsex

My wedding trip to UK was marred by one thing…it wasn’t my wedding. Kate and William were scene- stealing and I’m not even dating… still, I was thrilled at the thought of breathing in the same air the Royals would be exhaling at Westminster Abbey. I even brought a little black dress, just in case.

My London hosts, however, were less than excited about the forthcoming nuptials, and Richard’s boyfriend Andy kept muttering something about the Republican rally in Soho Square. I used to feel the way they did; preferred funerals to weddings, but as I’ve gotten older and more  saddened by the thought that my burial plot won’t be near a beloved, weddings have become a more interesting way to expand my sense of property values.

My first stop at wedding central was to find the grove of twelve mystical trees in Green Park, a lovely natural setting, close to marriage  headquarters. Unfortunately, the border of Green Park was flanked by a media campaign that encroached on the greenery, but gave a nice viewing post for the journalists who descended  like locusts from all over the globe. Usually it’s ‘lead with bleed’ for most newspapers, but on the occasion of  this royal wedding, cynical reporters were being pelted not by bullets, but the huge happy faces on visiting American, Japanese, the lot. Faced with little choice and in full knowledge of their upcoming mortgage payments, they pretended to also  join in the revelry.

My forever failure will be that I only made it to the wedding site post the ceremony because I was locked on a train returning from Devon. Not that Devon is a bad place at all, but I sort of hoped that the national railroad would be blasting the wedding on little airplane screens for the poor sods who were stuck in transit. I shouldn’t have gone south on that day, but part of me was just too embarrassed to admit that I wanted to be in London for the wedding…old, tough, cynical me… so my embarrassment left me in limbo on a fast speed train without internet access.

 Lovely Totnes did have a few cafes offering scones and ‘look at her dress’ and moan breakfasts, but for the most part, people in southern England were more enchanted with the perfect global warming weather they were enjoying than the marriage of Will and Kate. 

The  friend I was visiting also couldn’t have cared less, having been unhappily married once  and much more interested in preparing for the week’s fast she would be doing starteing on the wedding day. So by the time I headed back to London, I was dependent primarily on my own romantic fantasies to keep the flame alive. 

Getting off at Waterloo provided just that flame. The streets were filled with international revelers still waving their Hello flags and looking genuinely pleased with themselves for having made the effort. It’s in our DNA, this romantic aspiration. We are raised on castles and kings and the myth of the happy endings, that myth only recently having been expropriated  by sexual massage parlors. Mostly everyone wants to believe in beauty and love… except for those who prefer evil, power and WMDs. But on September 29th, they seemed greatly outnumbered.

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