Grooms in Cornwall and Devon

---

Grooms Column: Keep it clean

---

Looking sharp and wedding-ready? As Nathan Midgley discovers, it rarely lasts for long.

---

---

Looking sharp and wedding-ready? As Nathan Midgley discovers, it rarely lasts for long...

I bought a pocket square a few weeks ago. I hadn't really meant to, but I was picking up a new suit for a relative's wedding, and upscale menswear shops stress me to the point of simply agreeing to whatever anyone says. "Do you want the pocket square?" asked the girl at the till. "Yes," I said. Even if she'd put it in slightly more direct terms - "Do you want to pay £20 for a flimsy square of linen?" - I suspect I'd have done the same thing. You would have to. They make upscale menswear shops stressful for a reason.



Since I'd bought it, I decided to make the best of it. I tried a puff, a single-pointed fold and a (botched) two-pointed fold, and finally settled on a clean straight line. And it looked rather good. I got a sudden jolt of pride: I knew how to work a pocket square, and I was going to wear that suit impeccably.

Then we met Ralphie: young, eager and whippet-lean, as one-year-old whippets tend to be. He belonged to the couple who owned our rental cottage in a little Oxfordshire village, and we made a huge fuss of him at first, rubbing his ears when he leapt up to paw us - and later laughing when we noticed he had a keen ear for the cottage door, and would come begging for attention as soon as he heard it.

It wasn't until we started to dress for the wedding the next day that we did the maths. Between us and the cab there was roughly 40-feet of private gravel drive, patrolled by a dog for whom pawing and licking were a way of life. The chances of getting there with our finery intact looked slim.

So what did we do? We cowered in the cottage like teens in a zombie flick, gingerly testing the door to see whether Ralphie would come tearing from the shadows. In the end, the menfolk led an advance party then looked back in horror as, with the girls halfway up the drive, the dog finally twigged. He rounded the corner of the cottage at a dead sprint, and nearly had them - you try running through gravel in heels - when the man of the house strode silently out of the bushes and grabbed him.

It was success, but it didn't last long. We arrived early and found the bar both temptingly quiet and astonishingly cheap; I remember beer one going down just before two o'clock, and, before the evening was out, one of our party was dancing piggyback on the shoulders of the bride's cousin, waving his tie above his head like a lasso. My pocket square went through a series of wild contortions - probably attaining a perfect two-pointed fold at some point, if only by the law of averages - and finally disappeared completely during a mass invasion of the village hall's stage. We might as well have just brought Ralphie along. I think he'd have liked it.
 
Copyright Wed magazine 2014