By Laura Hutchinson
I WON'T lie to you, I generally hate fairs of any kind. Gadget fairs, fashion fairs, craft fairs. They all promise a whole host of goodies, loads of free treatments and advice, access to some of the best in the business, and demonstrations of some of the latest and greatest. Alas, those “free goodies” actually amount to a paper bag filled with a free magazine about the menopause, some teabags, and a bottle of water; the treatments and advice are usually of the “spend six billion quid and we’ll throw in a free nail clippers” and “don’t eat yellow snow” variety; the “best in the business” includes Mary from up the road who’s just started making candles in her bathtub; and the demonstrations invariably involve some guy with too much time on his hands, and too many AA batteries, operating a remote-controlled thingamajig by pressing a series of buttons that only a double-jointed hand could handle.
So no, on the whole, they’re not for me. Which is exactly what I said when I heard about a wedding fair in Citywest. The last thing I wanted was to be landed with eleventy zillion leaflets on table layouts and different types of confetti, and to trudge wearily from stand to stand, listening to peddlers tell me how crap my wedding will be if I don’t include whatever they happen to be selling that day. They’ve perfected the art of giving the same sales patter over and over again to every hapless victim who happens to walk too close to their web.
I suspect that, more often than not, brides go in with visions of a simple, classy wedding, and leave having booked a tiara, a cake in the shape of a My Little Pony, a pink stretch Hummer, and a stripper. All in all, fairs are generally where you go when you want to be sold things you didn’t even know you needed.
But then my wedding planner, Blaithin, said she was going, and that she’d be looking at practical things like flowers and cakes and invitations and such. And I felt bad ‘cause I’ve put absolutely zero effort into the whole wedding planning thing since before Christmas. (Aren’t the holidays a great excuse to do sod all for a week or two?) So I went.
No sooner were we in the door than we spotted a wedding dress stall. Now, I was pretty sure I’d already found my dress (as regular readers will know) so I was just going to float on by, but Blaithin had other ideas. Before I knew it, I was in a tiny cubicle in mismatched underwear, slipping myself into a glamorous gown. I shuffled out to the mirror while Blaithin surreptitiously snapped a few pictures on her phone (and was subsequently given out to by the lady running the stall).
And that was that. I was in love.
Damn that cursed fair to hell! I was so sure I was all sorted, dress-wise, and then this evil event, true to form, went and showed me what I didn’t even know I needed. And I did need it. So I bought it.
Cursing the fair for getting its claws into me, I moved on from the dress and stumbled from stall to stall, barely hearing speeches about how I absolutely had to have a DJ. But not just for the wee hours. No, this guy reckoned I needed a DJ for the entire day – from before the ceremony to after the last man standing. Luckily, I was still so dazed from the dress that I managed to avoid that particular financial black hole.
But then it happened again: out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a giant lollipop and knew that, wherever it was, I needed to be. So I dragged Blaithin to a stand selling “candy buffets”. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s basically a big buffet of sweets. Just a giant table covered in every sort of diabetes-inducing deliciousness you can think of. With my sweet tooth salivating, I paid the deposit and booked my date. And then I was outta there before I could do any more damage to myself and my wallet.
I went home both deliriously happy and furiously enraged. Despite knowing exactly what type of honey trap I was walking into, I still got stung. In fact, the whole experience was so draining, I had to go take a long lie down. Luckily, after mulling over the events of the day, I re-joined the land of the living and resolved not to be so hard on myself. I mean, I’d survived relatively unscathed. I avoided the tiaras and stretch Hummers, and I was still pretty confident I didn’t want a stripper. So maybe things weren’t so bad.
After all, it’s a strong woman that can resist the lure of a beautiful dress and a truckload of treats.