How Much Booze Is Too Much On The Big Day?
How much booze is too much; for your guests and for you the Groom?
I once attended a wedding where a generous Uncle had offered to buy some champagne for the reception drinks. A lovely gesture, but his largesse extended not just to a glass per person but a whole bottle per person. That’s a lot of fizzy booze to get through and the venue staff were keen to top up your glass as soon as you took so much as a sip. Consequently everyone was hammered by the time we sat down for the meal, and a usually reserved, polite retired teacher had to be carried back to his room.
The trick is in achieving a balance between making your guests feel nicely provided for, looked after and a little loosened up without letting the reception resemble some sort of Tennent’s Super fuelled vagrant wrestling match, the kind of thing I’m led to believe you can watch and bet on in some of the more disreputable areas of the World Wide Internet.
When we were concerned there wouldn’t be enough booze for our reception the lovely co-ordinator at our wedding venue The Tab Venue pointed out what we had was enough for six drinks per person before the evening bar opened, which is probably plenty unless we want a reception that rivals the tour exploits of the more morally unencumbered rock bands of the 70s for debauchery.
Even the intake of evening only guests is a concern. I went down to down Bognor Regis for the wedding of one of Hannah’s university chums, but I and several other boyfriends (boyfriends of the other guests, not Hannah’s other boyfriends) were only invited to the evening do. So everyone travelled down together on the Saturday morning, and the pub over the road from the venue had been nominated as a kind of boyfriend crèche for the afternoon. We were all under strict instructions from our better halves not to turn up to the reception paralytic, but what are several men who barely know each other to do when left to their own devices on licensed premises in an unfamiliar town?
We all agreed that “as long as we have something to eat we’ll be fine,” and repeated this increasingly slurred mantra throughout the day, before receiving the shock news that the pub didn’t do food. In desperation we managed to get a Chinese takeaway delivered to the car park, but by the time it arrived the damage was done. The atmosphere around the table was depressed as we nursed our whiskeys, struggling to stay awake and silently mulling over exactly how much trouble we were in with our respective partners.
Then, it seemed, we had been granted a reprieve by the booze gods, for I saw through the pub window the girls wandering across the road to collect us, each holding a drink and chatting animatedly in a formation technically known as “a gaggle.” “Itsh all alwright!” I announced to the men folk “Theysh all hammered!” I rose unsteadily to my feet and staggered confidently out of the pub to greet them. My confidence was quickly punctured when they caught sight of me. There was pointing and laughing and cries of “look at the state of it!” As the night progressed I would be witnessed sitting on the dance floor doing the time honoured “Oops Upside Your Head,” dance. On my own.
As for my intake on my big day, it should be clear by now that I love a drink.
And after that, I love another drink. But I do want to remember my wedding day, unlike another groom I’ve spoken to recently who recalls nothing past about 4pm and was reduced to piecing the day together from the photos (one of which showed him behind the bar helping himself) so I’m not going overboard. I’m very much looking forward to enjoying a refreshing Pimm’s in the sunshine, washing down the meal with a glass or two of red, toasting my new wife with a glass of champagne, sinking a couple of ales and perhaps rounding the night off with a good scotch. Actually that sounds like quite a lot, but over about seven hours, with plenty of food not procured at the last minute from a take away and eaten in a car park (fingers crossed), it seems a sensible amount.
What I am determined to avoid is a repeat of my behaviour at the celebratory engagement drinks we had with friends some time ago. As I am sure will be the case on the wedding day, I was constantly offered drinks and when yet another offer was shouted from the bar I looked at the two full pints of bitter already in front of me. I carefully weighed up the situation with drunk logic. I clearly didn’t need a third pint of bitter; that would be madness. So I did the responsible thing and shouted back “Tequila!” When we got home Hannah was concerned to hear an almighty crash from the bathroom and rushed in to find me on my back in the bath, chuckling quietly to myself. This is not how I want to spend my wedding night.
It is, however, almost certainly how I’ll be spending my stag do.
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