Susan Morrison: What’s wrong with having a gay old time?

There was a time, y’know, when all weddings were gay. That’s what the whole getting married thing was about when I was a kid.

The wedding was a bit dull, admittedly. You had to sit very very still in church or risk the wrath of your mum, unless you were the youngest person there, in which case your job was to wail at the top of your lungs though the hymns and especially the vows. This could be a bit of a pain if, in fact, you were the youngest in attendance but you were actually 22.

Then it was off to the nearest hall and the adults would drink a lot of something that looked like Irn-Bru which you weren’t aloud to taste and start to talk very loudly and dance very badly until the hot sausage rolls and sarnies came out and and then you went home with your mum and dad and everything was very quiet the next day.

To quote the Flintstones, we’d have a gay old time.

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The point of a wedding, I always thought, was to celebrate. Somehow in this demented world, two people had found each other and thought, you know what, I could cruise the aisles of B&Q with you for the rest of my life. We, their friends and family would be tickled pink for them and agree to dress up and do the Birdy Dance and sneak the bride fags on the big day.

It doesn’t matter who or what the two people are.

By jings, I can remember not just those rose-tinted weddings, but also the women with the stony faces pulling their coats tighter around their bolster bosoms and glaring at the young couple coming out of the church, sure and certain of their path to damnation because she was white and he was black.

They would mutter that such things were not natural.

Well, we’ve heard a lot about things not being natural in the last week. It is not natural for two people of the same sex to fall in love with one another. In nature, you don’t see two lionesses getting it on, do you? Or two penguins waddling off into the sunset – although, let’s be honest here, penguins come ready dressed for weddings.

Since when did the natural world become our blueprint for human behaviour? Are we to look forward to a time when we have predators prowling Princes Street like young lady lions, eyeing up the herds of drifting shoppers to target the elderly and the infirm with a view to taking them down? I thought we were the smart ones on the planet?

Holier than thou

OTHER mutterings claim that God wouldn’t be happy about this sort of thing, you know. Well,

I checked the 10 Handy Rules To Live Your Life By – possibly the world’s first self-help manual – and while the Big Man seems to be getting worked up over graven images and specifically NOT shopping in B&Q on a Sunday on account of it being sacred and all, he doesn’t actually mention who should and should not get married. However, he does mention not killing people. Good call, God. Let’s pay more attention to that one, people.

Going underground is monarch’s must-have

SPEAKING of kings, the discovery of Richard III under a Leicester car park was astounding. Surely the final resting place of Shergar is next. I’d start in the freezer aisle in Tesco, next to the burgers.

We have our own missing king. Poor James IV, who met his end at Flodden, was hauled off the battlefield, embalmed and shipped to London, and then vanishes. It’s the 500th anniversary this year – anyone else think it’s worth a rummage about some car parks down south?

Royal prerogative – horny Henry rewrote the rules

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IT’S undermining marriage, they wail. Unlike oh, I dunno, Henry VIII, who liked wedding cake so much he got married six times. He got around the idea of alimony by beheading two of his wives.

Neither of these two scorned sisters hot with spurned fury could then blab to the press that they took the points on their driving licence for a speeding spouse.

Henry, of course, kept getting married in a desperate attempt to breed a male heir to hold on to a wobbly throne. It’s one reason to get married. Katie Price was told by a psychic that she would marry a man called Kevin. Shortly after, she meet Kieran (close) and bingo! It’s off to some quiet beach with only a few close friends and the world’s press in attendance to say “I do”.

There’s a woman who values an institution . . .

Mind you, give it to the lady, she did make the groom sign a pre-nup.

Henry never did that. All he did was tip the wink to the axeman, oh, and rewrite religion to make himself head of his own church. At lot of folk at the time thought that was pretty unnatural.