Mimi Spencer: Just like Jennifer Aniston, I'd like to get married for a second time - but to the same man!
I'd dearly love to get married again. Not to a new husband, you understand, but simply to rerun the day and do it differently, with the benefit of hindsight, maturity and, I don’t know…wisdom. I got married on a cliff-top fort in Cornwall, which sounds unutterably romantic on paper.
Jennifer Aniston is planning her big day to fiance Justin Theroux
But when you factor in the gale-force winds, a Moroccan tent which arrived on site with no pegs, no instructions, no muscle and then blew down in the aforementioned gale, heavy traffic on the M5, plus a best man who drank his own body weight in champagne before bumbling through a few rude anecdotes and collapsing into the cheese course – when you add up all of that, the memories aren’t quite what I might have hoped.
So I feel for Jennifer Aniston, whose nuptials to Justin Theroux must be the most microscopically scrutinised since dear Kate married our Wills.
According to the wedding planner who choreographed the fantasia that was her marriage to Brad Pitt back in 2000 (50,000 flowers, a 13-minute firework display, 40-member gospel choir, lotus flowers floating in a specially built fountain), she found the whole experience unbearably stressful.
I can well imagine that she got as far as the vows and then wanted to go and hide in the bathroom until it was all over and someone could bring her some comfy trackie bottoms and a couple of Tylenol.
I’m certain that many brides feel this way on their Big Day. It’s all so freakishly intense. One woman I know was so overcome by her own wedding that she downed three large whiskies before weaving down the aisle, then three more as the guests arrived at her lavish reception.
Not long afterwards – perhaps three or four more whiskies later – she passed out in the honeymoon suite upstairs and missed everything. Everything. The delicious filo tartlet canapés, the expensive swing band, the speeches, the bit where Great Uncle Tom dances to ‘Single Ladies’ by Beyoncé, the lot.
The poor love woke up next morning in the four-poster bed with nothing to show for her wedding day but a golden ring, a giant bill and the kind of hangover that makes poking yourself in the eye with a pie fork seem like blessed relief.
This time round, clever Jen has rightly decided to go intimate. Low key. You know, just Courteney Cox and Ben Stiller and a handful of other A-rated glossies in the $21 million Bel Air mansion, perhaps. A teeny tiny little Valentino gown. Nothing de trop. Good for her.
If I had my time again, I too would go small. Given the choice and the funding, I’d probably retie the knot on the terrace of a Tuscan farmhouse with a view over the hills of Florence, followed by one of those long, lazy meals that goes on past sunset, with 17 people, a lot of local wine and someone playing the accordion.
I’d wear a gauzy sundress on shoestring straps, with bare feet and daisies in my hair. There’d be none of the curious acrobatics that have come to define the modern wedding, where everything has a price list and an invoice attached: no photographer herding family members into the correct groupings for a portrait in front of the rhododendrons, no hired Rolls with silken cushions, no confusing Moss Bros cravats, no ‘first dance’ where everyone watches to see if you’ve learnt how to salsa. None of that. Just simplicity and joy.
I wonder whether Jen can pull that off. Judging by her eight-carat diamond engagement ring, roughly the size of a quail’s egg, I do have my doubts.
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