Do you *need* a new outfit for that wedding?

Also, why you should never use the doughnut emoji, a good weekend lunch, a book, The White Lotus finale, and the most embarrassing thing Dennis has EVER done...

Uh oh. It’s that time of year again. The time of year when we start being deluged by wedding content. There have been 122 threads on Mumsnet about them in the past week alone - with users asking questions like how much to spend on wedding presents, whether you can wear flat shoes to a wedding, whether an Englishman can wear a kilt to a Scottish wedding and so on. There’s even one titled ‘period pants for excess groin sweat!’ asking users what kind of period pants are best to wear for a wedding to avoid sweating in the groin area. I ❤️ Mumsnet threads so much.

Some thoughts from Mumsnetters about period pants at weddings

Anyway, weddings. We’re on. They’re here. I’m off to one on Saturday which is very exciting, but I faced the usual panic a few weeks ago when I thought ‘What on earth am I going to wear?’ There seems to be a peculiar rule, these days, that you cannot POSSIBLY wear the same outfit twice. So if you wear a posh new frock to one wedding, you mustn’t wear it to another wedding Why? What will happen? Will the sky fall in? Does it matter if someone sees you in the same thing twice? Will one of you turn into a pillar of salt?

I blame social media, because people want to post pictures of themselves, but feel they need to look different in each one, ergo they need a new outfit for each picture. Sometimes, this makes me think quite fondly of old novels in which the heroine only has one good dress and must make it work for every ball she goes to.

Unless you’re the actual bride, perhaps the old adage ‘nobody’s looking at you, dear’ could be recalled when it comes to weddings? No, ok, maybe that’s a bit mean. I totally get that everyone wants to look their best. But these days there just also seems to be this MAD obsession with having a new dress and new shoes and a new bag and new earrings in order to attend a wedding, and that’s on top of already having spent 32 gazillion pounds on travel and hotels and a set of matching spatulas from the wedding list.

So, obviously I panicked about what to wear for the wedding this weekend myself, debated going to Zara a high-street store for a new outfit which was sewn by exploited children, and then decided to hire something instead. I’ve done this a handful of times for weddings, most successfully from a place called Loan The Look, which has a studio in Notting Hill where you can go and try the frocks on BEFORE hiring them. This is helpful because then you know it’ll actually fit, instead of the thing arriving in the post two days before said wedding and not fitting at all.

A de la Vali dress I hired from Loan The Look for my friend Lils’ wedding. Bride, groom, father-of-the bride etc being serious and concentrating on photos in the background; me clutching two champagne glasses.

I’ve also hired successfully from By Rotation and Hurr. For my pal Georgie’s wedding, at the Royal Hospital in 2021, I hired a silver, sequinned Temperley jumpsuit which was fab although I kept snagging it on things, and left a trail of silver sequins from the chapel through to the reception area, which I remember thinking might have confused the Chelsea pensioners when they arrived for church the following morning.

Obviously hiring outfits isn’t a wholly new thing. I’m only mentioning it today because I was banging on about it to a friend over the weekend and she said she’d always been too nervous to give it a go. Don’t be nervous! It’s easy peasy - mine have always arrived the day before I’ve booked them to, with a bag to post them back, and you don’t have to worry about washing or dry cleaning. It means you can wear expensive things that you’d never buy and feel a million bucks (the gold, Shirley Bassey jumpsuit I’m wearing this weekend has cost me something like £60 when it retails for £600), it’s eco, it saves you a panicked trip to Zara and so on and so on. Give it a whirl this summer if you fancy. OR, alternatively, you honestly can wear something you already own and have worn to a previous wedding. I’ve done this too and guess what? The sky stayed firmly up. Nobody turned into salt.

(Also, on period pants, I find the best ones are from Uniqlo. YOU’RE WELCOME.)

Pictures of the week

Those of you with school-aged children have probably seen the above. My friend Sarah sent it to me last week, saying it was circulating on the parents WhatsApp groups post-Adolescence. As the title slightly gives away, it’s emojis explained and I know I probably shouldn’t laugh, but some of them really did make me laugh. The poor cat, for example! And the doughnut! I feel like I might have inadvertently sent the doughnut to someone before to denote that I was hungry, and that is a mistake I shall try never to make again. Also, I didn’t know all the hearts meant different things. I don’t *think* I’ve used the purple heart before but, again, I might think twice now before popping it on the end of a message to a friend.

I had friends for lunch in the garden on Sunday, and I was trying to work out what to cook ahead, because when it’s sunny like this, roast pork/beef/lamb etc feels a bit much? A bit wintery? So I settled on toad-in-the-hole which I’d never made before, and although my batter went slightly mad, it was quite delicious. Jamie’s recipe says fling a few sprigs of rosemary in with the batter, so I did that. And I made a huge bowl of salad (but interesting salad, with mozzarella and pomegranate seeds and mangetout and pine nuts) to go with it, and then I slightly let the side down by dumping a bit bottle of ketchup on the table. But it was v good and VERY easy, if you’re after something uncomplicated for sunny weekends.

Recommendations of the week

• The Safekeep by Yael Van der Wouden. This was shortlisted for the Booker (don’t let you put that off), and has just been shortlisted for The Women’s Prize. I haven’t quite finished it yet, so this is a bold recommendation given that I’ve got a quarter to go and don’t know how it will pan out. But it’s a deeply atmospheric novel set in the post-Nazi Netherlands, about a lonely 27-year old woman called Isabel whose life is upended when a house guest comes to stay. That may not sell it for you, but it’s very compelling and beautifully-written, although there are some sexy bits which you may not love if you’re not into that sort of thing. Still, even the sexy bits are very beautifully written unlike, ahem, some other authors (🙋‍♀️) who write jokey and fairly embarrassing sex scenes in their novels.

  I’d assumed, given the author’s name, that the book had been translated from Dutch and was even more impressed at how brilliant it was as a result, but I learned on my internet travels yesterday that Van der Wouden wrote her book in English. This reminded me of an interesting slash intensely depressing thing that a publishing friend who came for dinner told me last week. Until around six months ago, this publishing friend said, when novels were translated, this would be a six-week job for a skilled translator. But in the past six months, that industry has been decimated by AI. All of a sudden, the majority of commercial books are being translated by AI, then an editor is given a week to go through and check it makes sense. I try not to be a misrerabilist about AI because an enormous amount of good will come of it (right?!) and there’s little point in being all Luddite, but I did find this profoundly sad. Six months! In just six months that very skilled job has been wiped out.

  On the same note, if you want to understand the row currently going on about Meta’s extremely dubious use of AI, essentially ripping authors off by using their books illegally to train their AI model, listen to THIS recent episode of The Rest Is Entertainment. Sigh.

• I know I mentioned that sourdough bread is a con in my list of things I’ve learned by 40, the other day But what I didn’t include in that list was a disclaimer to exclude Jason’s sourdough from the list. I know, I know, lots of people know about Jason’s sourdough, it’s a cult hit etc etc. But for anyone who doesn’t know about it, it’s the bread in blue packets in the supermarket and it’s GREAT. It’s sliced already, which means you don’t risk slicing off your hand as the bread knife skitters across the hard sourdough crust like a skier on ice, and it also doesn’t take the roof of your mouth off as you eat it. Anyway, there was a lovely interview with actual Jason in the Mail over the weekend, which I enjoyed very much and includes terrific details eg Jason calls his sourdough mother ‘Sidney’ after his grandfather, who was also a baker. HERE’S the interview if you’re interested. Jason sounds like a nice man.

• PS. The Times’s review of The White Lotus by never-wrong Carol Midgley is BANG ON. HERE it is. Three outta five stars, she says, and she makes all the pertinent points about the finale, imho. Maaaaajor spoilers though so don’t read it if you haven’t seen last night’s episode yet.

Nonsense of the Week Etiquette Conundrum of the Week

Dennis and I went to Beckenham Place Park for an afternoon walk last week. Much though I love Crystal Palace Park, occasionally three walks a day doing the same loop wears thin. So, off we went to Beckenham Place Park for a change. And this was lovely in the sunshine until a moment in the woods when we walked past quite a large man, standing very still, taking photos of the birds with an enormous lens. I strolled past him and summoned Dennis after me because he’d stopped to have a sniff of the man’s walking boots. And then, before I could stop him, he nonchalantly cocked his leg and peed on his shin.

‘Dennis!’ I shouted in horror, whereupon the large ornithologist lowered his camera and leapt backwards.

‘What the f**k!’ he said, examining his leg.

‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t have any tissues, I’m so sorry,’ I kept repeating as the birder blinked down at his leg, glared at me, looked at Dennis as if he wanted to eat him too, then blinked back at his leg.

Dennis, by this point, not remotely remorseful, had trotted on ahead.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again, ‘Can I…er…give you this?’ I pulled a poo bag from my pocket.

‘That’s not going to do much good, is it?’ he snarled, and I had to admit that, no, no a plastic poo bag probably wasn’t going to be much use on a damp leg.

So we both walked on in different directions, me cringing with embarrassment; the birder furious; Dennis oblivious, finishing a child’s dropped ice-cream nearby.

I can only imagine that Dennis thought the birder’s leg was a tree trunk because it was so sturdy. But, cor, I was ashamed, and I couldn’t really do anything to help! What does one do in that situation other than mumble apologies?

Dennis, also last week, lying in the shoe basket, where he deliberately goes to look accusingly at me through the window whenever I leave the house without him.