THE GANG NOSH: A SOCIAL PROBLEM
Digby Anderson is aghast at
the latest craze among young people, and suggests a return to old values
INCREASINGLY over the last few years, especially in the summer months, most unpleasant events have been occurring on Saturday afternoons. Young people, and from the middle classes, who have been involved in these occasions and been severely shaken by them have described to me what happens in horrific detail.
Alerted by messages giving time and location, large numbers of persons — from good families, remember — drive across the country to cheap chain-hotels, often near motorways. From these they are col- lected in fleets of charabancs and minibus- es and conveyed to other second-rate hotels in villages or to dilapidated church halls. By 4 p.m. some 200 or so will have gathered and started to gulp down lots of second-rate champagne, or even imitation champagne, until they are tiddly. Then they sit down to the most appalling food: prawn cocktails or packet soups, tasteless rolls, overcooked farmed salmon or shiny ham salads with bottled 'mayonnaise' and sweaty new potatoes, cold puddings made from frozen raspberries eaten out of cheap glass cups, industrial Cheddar and ersatz coffee — with one mint each — all accom- panied by cheap wine from Germany or Australia. They then drink whisky, tell unfunny and often unseemly jokes and lurch about bumping into each other to something called a discotheque. When they've had enough lurching, the charabanc returns to take them to their motorway hotel, where they make unsuccessful attempts to copulate, vomit up the pink salmon, shiny yellow Cheddar, mauve rasp- berries and the rest, then fall asleep on the floor.
The justification offered for all this is something which happens between the two second-rate hotels: the chara stops briefly and the young people plus a few oldies pile into a church where two of their number are married in the vile language of the newer rites of the C of E or RC Church. They come out of the church and are not showered with confetti because the clergy- man says it makes a mess.
English weddings never used to be like this. And the worst change of all, because it is responsible for all the others, is the insis- tence on huge numbers of people having what is referred to as 'a sit-down meal'. The large numbers mean the reception cannot be held where it ought to be — at the bride's mothers. Hence the second-rate hotels and tenth-rate food. The other deeply damaging change is the manic insis- tence that the whole show should go on and on. This means things have to be found to keep people amused, hence the dis- cotheque and perhaps the meal: more than an hour and a half on bad champagne is too much even for young people. It is also the insistence that the jollity go on and on which makes it necessary to stay the night and leads to the motorway hotels, and the charas between them and the wedding.
What has happened to the middle class- es' instinctive distaste for crowds or the southern gentleman's horror — for these events occur in Kent and Sussex as well as Yorkshire — at the notion of eating at six, at the idea of high tea?
Let me remind younger Spectator read- ers how weddings should be done. Invite only as many people as you can afford to receive properly. The reception is at the bride's mother's house. The house is taste- fully furnished. If it is not, the engaged young man should not book a nasty hotel but seriously ask whether the whole busi- ness should be allowed to proceed: daugh- ters have ways of inheriting their mothers' tastes. Everyone has three or four glasses of good champagne. After an hour, brief speeches are made, the cake is cut and after a further quarter of an hour the bride and groom leave for Paris or Venice. They do not — as in the new rite — get drunk and shuffle about for hours with their `mates' until the early hours. After the couple leave, the guests start to leave. They return to their own homes or per- haps in small parties, but, in either case they are back home in time for a proper dinner at 8.30. If far from home, they stay with friends or in a good hotel, and have dinner there.
It is clear that in the correct English wedding eating is of little importance. One Is not there long enough to make substan- tial eating possible and, anyway, it would spoil dinner. What is served is really a sort of variation on tea, tea suitable for drink- ing pop with: perhaps a sandwich of wild under-poached salmon with cucumber, a little caviar, some smoked salmon or foie gras, that sort of thing. There is no dis- cotheque, of course, and not a chara in sight. Above all, no one, except the termi- nally infirm, sits down to eat. There is no thronging round seating plans, anxiously wondering who you've got, no opportunity for unfunny pranksters to see what hap- pens if we put Denise next to Richard, no having to endure someone's Australian aunt who likes culture or having to sit for three hours next to a lady whose adven- turesome talcum power is mixing disas- trously with the smell of the food. There are no seats.
The old English wedding was light and contained. The new musicalised gang-nosh marathon is neither. It has been suggested to me that the Scots are to blame for this change in the middle-class English wed- ding. It is pointed out that, up there, they have wedding parties in the evening, that they dance and eat whatever Scottish peo- ple eat sitting down and that their brides and grooms, I presume because anxious to put off being alone together, attend to the bitter end. Rot! English gentlemen have never looked to the Scots as exemplars on eating or indeed social propriety, and the Scots have not imposed their awful feed- ing habits on these young people. The young people have chosen them and must bear full responsibility. Indeed it is obvi- ous that any one who wants one of these disgusting mass weddings with awful food and lots of lurching, vomiting 'mates', is not ready for marriage and is still too young. Instead of asking about their reli- gious beliefs, clergy should ask young cou- ples what reception they have in mind and refuse to marry anyone wanting a gang nosh.
And while on the subject of the clergy, the old-style English couple would not have been fobbed off with one of these hideous, matey services. They would have worked out the trick, which is to write to the parish priest, in Latin if you are RC, and 17th- century English if Anglican, explaining that this is your language, you understand mod- ern English only with difficulty and would he please choose a rite that is 'relevant' and 'speaks to you where you are'.
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