We receive a wedding invitation through the post. Carbonlite’s old friend, the best man at our wedding, is getting married. Again. But this time he’s saying ’I do’ in an obscure part of Germany. My whole family are invited. I sigh. Here we go again.
The last time we had an invite to a far-flung wedding we debated it for months, talking about whether or not the celebrations were worth the emissions. The planet is still trying to deal with my sister-in-law’s Slovakian wedding which involved five of our family sized bums on airplane seats, plus all the transfers and a long weekend of excursions to Borat-like attractions.
Watching Carbonlite’s brother waltz his new wife around a church hall without taking the fag out of his mouth probably wiped out a year’s worth of plastic bag saving by the population of Hastings, and formed a low point in my eco-worrying life.
So understandably we are reluctant to go. Love miles they call them. A modern wedding in another country is a test; one of the most challenging tests for the eco-minded. Especially if it’s the wedding of someone you like.
Now if I’d been invited to take a mini-break in Germany I’d have no trouble in making up my mind. The devil himself invented long haul mini-breaks.
Carbonlite’s best man and his fiancée have a website. A whole website about their wedding. I go on it, not to check out the wedding list, but to see whether we can get to the ceremony by boat, bike or horse. And the first thing I see is a picture of us. They have uploaded pictures of all their favourite wedding guests onto the site. Saves doing it on their honeymoon I suppose.
There we are, the whole family, grinning like the Waltons. And on the preceding pages are the full families of the happy couple. But when I look closer, I find no trace of his ex-wife or children. I can understand the ex-wife part of the equation, but his two little girls have also been airbrushed out of his life.
Now this puts a whole new slant on things. Not only would we be screwing more polar bears, but we’d be in serious trouble with the ex-wife of our best man. She’s probably gone right off us already after seeing our mugshots on the happy couple’s web display.
Now it’s a no brainer. Love miles plus wrath of ex-wife equals no show. If only all our environmental decisions were as easy.
