This weekend, my mum (who, coincidentally would be both horrified and overjoyed in equal measures if I were to get married this side of 30) reminded me why I am a terrible wedding guest.
No, nothing to do with flirting with the best man - though i have excelled at that in the past - my problem, according to my dear mother, is a tendancy towards kleptomania.
In classic motherly style, my mum has a dreadful habit of picking one isolated incident from my childhood and instantly rendering it characteristic of my entire behaviour. Forever.
Hence following an unfortunate run-in with a cloud of midges aged six, and coming out the other side looking like I had rubella, as far as my mum is concerned, I will forever be ‘allergic to mozzies’. It’s got nothing to do with the fact there were 6 million of the little fuckers, and that I scratched every single bite with grubby fingernails and swelled up like popcorn. Oh nononono.
Likewise, following the minor fraud experience I wrote about a while back, my mother is convinced that I am in fact at any given moment on the verge of committing another fraudulent offence, fleecing passing pedestrians for cash, and therefore need to be reminded of my juvenile misdemeanors with regularity.
Mum, I was eight. I’ve been a model citizen (well, sort of) since then. Give it a rest.
Anyway. Weddings. It was 1979, and we were at my aunt’s wedding in Germany. I was five, cute and impish - how times have changed, eh? - and my mum let me run around the reception being ex-and-shoff (mum’s shorthand for excited-and-showing-off, the most damning thing she could accuse anyone of) in my new green patchwork dress (100% polyester, rode up my woollen tights at every opportunity, and created showers of sparks when I span around, which I did frequently, being five). The reception was held in a big hall full of long tables covered in white cloths, and around a hundred and thirty people sat down to full silver-service posh nosh.
My mum talked amicably with the other guests. I ran around the hall being cute, making frequent forays to and from my mother’s lap. After a few hours, it was time to leave.
It was only when we got home that my mother discovered that her handbag contained 130 (approx) silver teaspoons, which I’d liberated from the table settings of every guest. Not a bad exchange really, for the late seventies - go to a wedding, give a £25 fondue set, come away with a couple of hundred quid’s worth of silver spoons. It’s just opportunism, isn’t it?
Mum had to post the teaspoons back to the hotel anonymously, and still won’t let me open the cutlery drawer at home without reminding me of the incident. In my defence, I’d like to point out
a) that I was five
b) that people willingly gave me their teaspoons because I was so darned cute and
c) that I was a magpie, and the spoons were especially shiny and pleasing to the eye.
I am not a kleptomaniac.
