ON a sunny day this week there was a wedding. Quiet people, all of them. There were no hen parties with the bride being left tied to a lamp post, no stag parties with a stripper photographed in close contact with the groom. These were not the kind of people who would have a printed Wedding List from which you picked a gift to buy for them. There were no Afters where the young friends of the happy couple joined the wedding party for a disco. Nobody put any shaving foam on the car, or tied beer cans to the back of it.
The telegrams sent good wishes for future happiness rather than technical sexual advice. The best man told one clean joke about St Peter at the gate of heaven which made everyone smile and nobody wince.
The photographer didn't spend hours and hours, there were no intrusive cam corders in the church. No excited pageboys and flower girls ran amok. There were no family arguments. There was no feeling that they had been hurried, ignored or short changed by the hotel.
So, all right, what went wrong?
They did not invite someone who thought she was going to be invited. She was a neighbour and lifelong friend of the family, she is a little deaf now, and has to sit down rather than stand about during the sherry party. But then people do sit down don't they? It couldn't be the reason they didn't invite her.
Could it? She has been over it all so many times, and it's so hard to know. She couldn't read any signals that would explain their attitude. She had known the bride since the girl was a little toddler and had been part of the whole wedding story, the steady line leading to the watch for Christmas and then the engagement ring. She had loved the whole romance unfolding but she didn't make much of it because young girls are so anxious at a time like this, it didn't do to look over eager.
She had even been in the house to help keep the conversation going when the groom's parents were brought over for an introduction some months back. She hadn't said much, she had stayed in the background, but they must have been pleased she was there to share the load of the evening.
Because she is on a pension and wouldn't be able to buy something grand enough, she polished up one of her own silver photograph frames and gave it as a wedding gift. It had been a wrench to part with it, it meant taking out a picture of her own parents long dead. She had made light of the gift, dismissing it so as not to let them know how she bated parting with it.
It was nicer than anything the couple had got from anyone else, she had seen the gifts as they arrived. The family had shown them to her, for heaven's sake. It wasn't as if they were keeping quiet about it all in front of her. That's what made it so strange. She had behaved perfectly over it all, not being too curious about things and asking who gave this and who gave that.
She went to Dublin and bought an outfit. It was exhausting getting to the shops and carrying it all home again on the train. It was expensive, and took a bigger chunk of her savings than she had thought it would.
No, she hadn't shown it to the family, because you didn't just presume, you waited to be asked. What would happen was they would say you are coming, aren't you, then you would say heavens no, you won't have room for the likes of me in the party and then you accept. That's what would have happened.
Except there had been no invitation.
NO the bridal family didn't seem at all embarrassed about not having invited her, they had talked cheerfully about the wedding like you would talk about a bank holiday, something that everyone would share, except of course that she hadn't been invited to share it. She had tried not to show too much interest in case it looked like she was begging to be invited.
She cried in her bed for many nights and then decided that she wouldn't stay around to be humiliated so she invented a friend who had invited her to stay. She booked a guest house which had the sole advantage of being near a railway station.
Now, someone who knew her, a person who to my mind is of a hugely endearing interfering sort of nature, got to know about the situation and a week before the wedding decided she would tell the wedding family of the terrible upset and wondered was there a way they might discover a so called mislaid invitation?
And then the other side of the coin was revealed. Their neighbour had made it totally clear she didn't want to go next or near the wedding, she asked them nothing about their plans for the day and just nodded when they told her what they were going to do.
She hadn't bothered to get the couple a present but had just given them an old picture frame from her sideboard, not even wrapped, saying "This will do you, won't it?"
She hadn't got an outfit or a single new thing to wear for it. She never asked where the young couple was going to live or what kind of things they had got to furnish their new home. She had come in to inspect the in laws and sat there with gimlet eyes watching everything and saying nothing. When they tried to tell her about the seating plan and find out who she'd like to be near she was shruggy and distant.
One evening it got too much for them, it was going to cost £26 a head for the guests. Why should they force her to come when she obviously didn't want to?
The bride's mother had a few second thoughts, maybe it was just her way, her manner, her style? But then she was forced to agree that people's way, manner, and style are actually how you know what they are like. We can't go around second guessing everyone, analysing them, wondering do they mean yes when they say no?
No, they said they hadn't been a bit cold to her themselves, they couldn't have done more to involve her.
The nice interfering friend of whom I approve so heartily realises much better than I do how you can't really rule the world and change the course of people's lives.
So she didn't play God.
And so on a sunny afternoon this week, a wedding took place without a neighbour and old friend, because the woman had sent out hostile and moody signals.
And a lonely woman sat in a bed and breakfast near a railway station and turned the pages of a magazine, her heart hard against a family who sent cold signals to her and had not managed to include her among the 80 guests who had given less valuable wedding gifts and bought less splendid wedding garments.
And because nobody ever thinks it's worthwhile to tell people that they really should show their affection and interest and not assume that everyone knows it's there you can be quite sure the air around us is just humming with signals all of which went the wrong way.