The new rules of marriage are don’t marry while sober. If you know what I mean. Brides drink their favorite champagne while the groom team have shots to psyche up the day. No man should marry when sober, TED narrates the ordeal of the Boozy Beginnings of the weeding morning.

I like weddings. I really do. Weddings are one of the few places where everyone is happy. (Well almost everyone). My friends from ‘Majuu’ don’t understand how big weddings here are. I tell them ‘here we dance and go crazy’. We eat and drink. We hug and drink some more.

Last month’s was my first wedding writing gig and frankly my last. The wedding was great. Superb. It actually wasn’t a horrible day, it was just a superb day and I don’t want to have others to compare it with. Meeting my barber Omosh was in fact my major highlight of the day.

I left the house at 7am for Isaac’s – the groom – house. He the 28-year-old rugby chap who had proposed to the girl who had been his girlfriend since his Mean Machine days. All the boys – groom and groomsmen – were getting prepped up for D-day. They welcomed me like a shemeji of theirs. I am a well-mannered African man, so it was only right that I showed up with a bottle of Jameson Whisky. They cheered loudly – you know how rugby guys are – and added the mzinga to the collection on the dining room. These guys were going to get married drunk.

We left for the pick-up, the brides in Spring Valley. My job was merely observing. The wedding was scheduled to be an evening ceremony but we somehow managed to get late. Drunk and psyched up, no bad energy could match. The groom’s family was denied entrance at the house due to unfinished dowry business. Kenyan weddings are an expensive affair – you pay pre dowry, then dowry, you grease some hands, buy mzingas, bales of unga, buy lesos for the aunty wa harriers and the extended community and buy more mzingas. The whole thing is a money circle. Please note, I am not complaining.

Brides steal the day on their wedding day and this one was no less. She was Taita – so you know the kind of brown skin I mean when I say she was brown. She was almost a replica of her mother. The exchanging of vows had her in tears. I was really tipsy during church service and so were the ‘boys’. You could tell, if you were keen. Everyone smiling and energies on the high. I was impressed by Isaac’s vows. He delivered them in the perfect drunk way – funny but not too funny.

Omosh was apparently a distant cousin to the groom. He asked me over a dozen times whether I was sure we weren’t cousins too. I am no dancer but some food plus more bottles of Jameson and I was grooving.

This was one of my best wedding experiences. How could it not be when the groom and his boys were Jameson Whisky guys?