I was a star in a reasonably-priced bra

Yesterday we had a family wedding and I was asked to read a poem - the most personal part of the ceremony - to the congregation. It was not a poem that read well on the page (it's lame, frankly) and it needed some expression and timing (also some editing), but I can report it went down really well, and I was very pleased. (If only the nation was short of people who can read poetry to an audience!! I could be a professional.) In this case, I was glad for my brother and new sister-in-law, because they had given us a lovely party and I helped to make their day a success.

The title is an allusion to Top Gear, a TV programme in which a celebrity drives a car around a track as fast as they can. They seem to love doing this. The feature is called "Star in a reasonably-priced car". I was not just wearing underwear; in fact, I bought a new reasonably-priced dress for the occasion.

When I got married

I wanted a deeply traditional wedding. I wanted a church in the country, the prayer book service, (in fact I wanted the very old prayer book service, but the vicar wasn't keen on it) and traditional hymns. I wanted the traditions I had grown up with because I hoped that this would root our marriage in the establishment, and that it would become a grounded old thing like the church, with its pews and stained glass windows and memorials; its very local history, and not some shoddy fashionable thing that comes and goes. My parents' marriage had broken up and I rather felt that this was because divorce had become rather fashionable; yes don't worry everyone is divorced these days; that was not what I wanted at all.

Also the person I married was not so much a person to me as a set of values deeply loved and respected, a set of values and a way of life that I knew would be good for me and for our offspring, if they came along (and I wanted them to come along).

But if I had got married in a registry office, to a different person, and really, if everything had been different, I might have chosen this poem. But I really have never travelled to this place, that seems to be so very beautiful.

Somewhere I have never traveled,
gladly beyond any experience,
your eyes have their silence:
In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

Your slightest look will easily unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
You open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens,
touching skillfully, mysteriously, her first rose

Or if your wish be to close me,
I and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility -- whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens
Only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.
Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

e.e. cummings