RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31579, 17 January 1968, Page 20

RANDOM REMINDER

DOUBLE TROUBLE

In just about every walk of life, there are periods of particular pressure in business. For the shop assistant, it may be the late night on Friday, for the petrol pump attendant, the night before yet another expected rise in the price of motor fuel, for the journalist, any old working day you may like to name. It appears that even the clergy have to suffer similar stresses. The vicar of a Dunedin church—a fine man who says he always reads this column and we would have been proud to shake his hand if we had ever been introduced—has written to tel! us about a wedding at which he had to officiate some weeks ago. He confesses to having had premonitions of difficulty in advance of the ceremony. It was a double wedding, and he bad to

master the problems of how to fit two brides, two bridegrooms, two fathers of the brides, two best men, a covey of bridesmaids, and a flower girl or so, into a very average aisle space. He then discovered that the brides were twin sisters and because they were on a working holiday from Australia, they were not well-known to the minister, who woke in the night several times with nightmares about marrying the wrong girl to the right boy, or the other way round. The prospect of confusion being compounded arose, he says, when he also discovered that one of the bridegrooms had the same surname of the twin sisters. Then the coup de grace. The sisters announced that as it was impossible for their father

to come over for the wedding, and asked if it would be all right if their fathers-in-law-to-be gave them away? ... Then there was the matter of compensating for the time taken in signing the register. They had asked that it be signed in church during the service; each person had to sign at least three times, equalling thirty signings. That the wedding went off, apparently, without a hitch, and that so far there has been no sharp correspondence with the registrar of Marriages in Wellington, the minister is obviously grateful. We respect his ability; and it is clear that men of the cloth develop a philosophical outlook. He says that the fact that the twins were not identical helped considerably.