I RECKON that every guest at a wedding should be given a badge so they can proudly proclaim which side they are on before the fighting starts.

I don't mean the old-fashioned tradition in church of sitting on the left if you know the bride, or on the right if you are related to the bridegroom.

No, I mean are you on the side of the bride's real father or her stepfather?

Four funerals and a wedding. That's our sad tally over the last couple of years. So it was nice to be invited to the jollity and gaiety of a wedding for once instead of being summonsed to a cremation.

The only good thing about funerals is that everyone is so full of grief, there is no room for family bitchiness. They save that for the weddings.

At the joining together in holy matrimony I attended at the weekend, I ended up wishing I'd worn a badge screaming "neutral." I did not know the bride's mother, father or stepfather but I got dragged into the wars as the livid scars of a 20-year-old divorce began to bleed all over again.

Imagine the bride's dilemma: Does she ask her real father to give her away, or the man who actually brought her up? Does she invite both parties on to the top table or does she keep them far enough apart that they can't throw drinks at each other? So it came to pass that her real father 'gave' her away and delivered a loving speech about his daughter growing up.

Which all sounded fine to me until a perfect stranger approached me at the bar and ripped into the man and the speech.

He turned out to be the stepfather, who resented every word - and every breath - that his former rival uttered.

I am just an ex-colleague of bride and groom and I don't want to be involved in the family politics, but he persists: "What a load of bull. Where was he when his daughter needed him? What's he doing here anyway?"

Naively and innocently, I ask if all that shouldn't be forgotten after all these years, especially on such a special day. Which just resulted in him gripping my arm harder and slurring more invective about his wife's former husband.

By this time the reception is in full swing. The tiny bridesmaids - giddy in their posh frocks, eye make-up and lipstick - are tired of being chased for a kiss by the seven-year-old page boy; and the best man is drunkenly apologising for dragging up that incident with the stripper in his speech.

Another guest then buttonholes me in another corner to complain about the wedding he was at last week. The bridegroom at that wedding, he said, was his best pal from university who had neglected to invite him on the stag night. During the reception he got chatting to a bloke who turned out to be the bridegroom's best man and brother. "Let me introduce you to my partner, Dave," said the best man. The befuddled guest enquired: "But you are in electronics and he is a lawyer, how can you be partners?"

They were not business partners so much as bedfellows - and it turned out the stag night was at a gay club in London.

At which point the guest went to his old pal, the bridegroom, berated him for not crediting him with being broadminded, and drove off into the night.

I listen to the story and nod, wishing I was at home in bed with a good book. Why pick on me? He would have continued for hours, but I'm rescued at the bar by my wife.

We meet another couple and the man spits out a bitter story of redundancy - and my wife and I decide it's time for a walk round the grounds of this wonderful hotel.

We wake up for breakfast in the morning, leave it as late as we can so we don't have to sit with the drunken lot from last night - and find the bride's father, mother and stepfather all tucking into bacon and eggs together as if they were bosom buddies.

Strange or wot?

Updated: 11:50 Tuesday, November 09, 2004