GIRL TALK: Column

Forget royals, this wedding is the real McCoy
It's been dubbed "the wedding of the century" but if you want my opinion, royal weddings are about as last century as lycra and Led Zeppelin.
What with recycled rings and all sorts of other promised austerity measures, it's just as well 25-foot trains are no longer en vogue (unless Kate borrows the frock too, of course).
No, if you want a real love story with all the trimmings, the wedding of the century happened last Sunday ... and it was my mum's.
It takes a lot to move a seasoned wedding photographer who sees almost 50 brides a year trot down the aisle towards happy ever after, but the sight of my mum being escorted by her two pint-sized grandsons towards the smiling eyes of her 72-year-old fiancé made even a seasoned pro like me a little weepy.
Weddings are promises for the future but, when you are in your twilight years, they are also about the road well travelled, and the bumps, scrapes and heartbreaks that have led to this moment in time.
When Mum was a young wife with three little children, my father, after years of fighting depression, took his own life.
With no family nearby to support her, she became the sort of mother who could climb mountains in her lunch break and make grown men whimper with only a look.
Few prospecting youths could stand up to the unspoken assault and, as a result, I spent my teenage years unhappily single, much to my mother's delight.
It took a bear of a man to stand up to my mum but, eventually, one happened along and was an adorable surrogate dad until he also died, when I was 17.
Despite his frequent requests, however, my mum remained steadfast in her resolve to never remarry.
Until Father Michael came along.
A friend for many years, no one imagined a Catholic priest who had spent 50 years of his life in a monastery as a monk would ever in a month of communion Sundays go where no other man would or could and ask for my mother's hand in marriage.
But it happened and, so now, after calling him Father Michael for as long as I can remember and then simply "Michael" for two short years after his decision to embrace secular life at 70 on his own, I am once again calling him Father Michael. Or sometimes just plain old Pops.
The mother who made an art form out of man-hating for so many years and hissed and spat if any male came within coo-ee is now happily married and delighting in all those things that, in her habitually single state, were denied to her for so long; dancing classes at the RSA on Thursdays, long drives through the countryside on sunny afternoons and romantic matinee movies with a hand to hold and someone to discuss the plot with afterwards.
As for Michael, half a century of service to God was a noble effort and now, like a child on Christmas morning, he is making up for lost time with his new Apple iPad and a fabulous thing called the world-wide web, Top Gear on Sundays instead of evening prayers and the opportunity to worship at the feet of the goddess of love who (unlike the God of his former religion) is able to answer back.
Although, like any new husband, my father Michael may discover this feature is not perhaps one of his wife's most endearing ones.