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My Wedding Day with Carl Plover: We didn't have a specific first dance — I regret that

We got engaged after six months, and then it took another year before we got married.

Tue, 09 Sep, 2025 - 20:00

Deirdre McArdle

We got married on July 5, 2003, in England. We’re both from Lincoln originally, but have lived in Ireland for over 20 years. My wife Linda’s parents had a fairly large garden in a village outside of Lincoln, we decided we would have our reception there, so we set up a marquee in the garden and that’s where we had the party.

We’re not particularly religious but we had the ceremony in this beautiful old church — All Saints in Nocton village, Lincolnshire. And then we had a horse and carriage to take us back to the marquee after the ceremony. We had someone singing at the church and it was really beautiful.

Myself and Linda are both musicians; we met at a music festival where we were performing. It took a while for us to get together, but music is where we are rooted. So we made sure we had our musician friends performing on the day, and we actually performed ourselves in the wedding as well. We joined the band later and did a few songs as well.

On the morning of the wedding I remember feeling really excited. I think I felt it was the start of our journey. So it was all systems go, really. Linda was classically late for the ceremony. I’m always on time, so there was some waiting around.

Linda’s dress was an elegant, classic white wedding gown and she looked beautiful on the day. She also had her daughter Hannah as her bridesmaid, which was lovely.

There were a few funny moments. We had ordered suits for the groom party. But my friend Egg, his suit and shoes got mixed up somehow and he got the wrong suit and the wrong shoes. He has quite big feet, and he couldn’t get into the shoes he’d received at all. The plan was he would swap shoes at the church with the groomsman they were meant for. But in the meantime, he had to wear some shoes, he couldn’t come to the church with no shoes, and ended up wearing sailor plimsolls, which was quite funny.

We had about 100 people at the wedding. And having it in a marquee in Linda’s parents’ garden meant we had more control over the organising. We had a lot of fun making up the tables, deciding who to put at which tables and seeing how people would mix together. That was great.

Linda’s mom was used to organising big events so she took a lot of the organising on board, which was great. We had a buffet instead of the standard three-course meal, it was very relaxed. We also had a bar in the marquee.

We didn’t particularly have a first dance; we did get up and dance of course, but we didn’t really think about a specific first dance. We were so focused on everything else and we wanted all the music to be right. It’s a slight regret that we didn’t do that.

Our wedding was in the days before everyone had a mobile phone so we had some disposable cameras on each table so everyone could take pictures of the whole evening. After the wedding we took them all away and had them developed, and it was great to look back on those photos.

And the other thing we did that I thought was a nice touch was we had this big book that we passed around, and everyone could write messages in it. All our guests wrote messages, you know, wishing us well, and that was nice to look at after the wedding was over. So we had the photos and then the lovely words from our guests.

It was a fairly late night. We had great fun, it was a wonderful day. I look back on the day with such fond memories. As I said, music was one of the main roots of the day, and music is still the root of our life. And that was documented throughout the night really, with lots of music, singing, and dancing.

We had a lot of musician friends at the wedding and everyone was taking turns to get up and sing with the band. In our band Wasps v Humans, Linda and myself play punk folk music, but I am partial to a bit of Elvis so myself and Linda did get up and sing an Elvis tune on the night.

We got engaged after six months, and then it took another year before we got married. For me, the day felt like it was the start of a journey, of our big adventure together. I remember thinking that during the day and how much I was looking forward to getting started.