Our groom ponders the art of arriving in style...

“It's the size and shape of a coffin,” said Cathy's brother as we walked to the pub. “And it keeps breaking down.”

I'd heard our friend’s dad had fixed up a vintage MG for her wedding, but until my good lady and I arrived in the Isle of Wight I had no idea just how vintage. The smart money seemed to be on an MG Midget, a BMC two-seater our generation's parents went nuts for in the ‘60s and ‘70s.



"Yeah, it's most likely a Midget," I told Lucy confidently, picturing the white roadster my dad used to drive. "My dad was driving one of those when my parents got married. He looked pretty cool."

He does, too, in the photos. Long hair, white tee and flares, leaning one ass cheek against the chassis like a cowboy on a horse’s flank. Maybe not an ideal look for the bride, but that's the kind of purring, well-oiled confidence you want to arrive with.

But as we chatted on the night before the wedding it became clear that it wasn't an MG Midget at all. Midgets have small cabins, but they sit somewhere in the realm of sanity. To the best of my knowledge, what Cathy had was a 1930s MG F-Type, from whose even smaller cabin you can barely see the road. Even if you managed to drive it to the realm of sanity they’d turn you back at the gates.

Above all, it isn’t a car made for wedding dresses. The picture in my head resembled a vehicle filled with meringue exploding, with a slightly concerned female face somewhere in the middle of the blast radius.

And concerned she might well have been, because the car didn’t make up in reliability what it lacked in size. A decades-long resident of the family garage, it was more used to bricks than wheels and was on a conk-out rate of one a week – a fact Cathy’s dad had gone to great and entirely hopeless pains to hide. On the day before we arrived, she’d spotted him with it by the side of the road (small world, the Isle of Wight) and pulled over to ask whether he needed a hand.

“Nope,” he lied. “Just felt like stopping for a minute.” She nodded and left him stranded, which under the circumstances was an act of uncommon filial kindness.

So it had all the hallmarks of a fiasco, and I reflected as I dozed off on the night before the ceremony, that at least it would knock one more complicated thing off Lucy’s never-ending wish list. And then on the day the thing worked. Beautifully. Cool, purring, well oiled – the lot. They even managed to get the dress in and remain this side of surreal.

On the way out that evening we stopped to admire it in the moonlight, half expecting it to turn back into a pumpkin.

“What would you have?” she asked, knowing full well I couldn’t answer without admitting I wanted one too.

“Oldsmobile Straycat,” I said.

She made a noise that was equal parts indifference and victory, and we stumbled off towards the B&B.




words Nathan Midgley


Copyright WED Magazine 2011