I am one of only the two relatives of the bride who made it to Australia. The other is my aunt’s elderly aunt who looks and behaves like Lady Catherine de Burgh, so I find her quite funny, though her actual relatives chafe. She has decided she likes me, as she came into my room just now to embrace me and hand me a piece of paper with her address on it, saying that if I ever came to South Carolina I should come and stay with her.
Meanwhile, from the groom’s visitors from America: the aunt is in hospital with a flare-up of her auto-immune disease, the mother is recovering from a bad stomach ailment, and the father, who is a Trump-supporting anti-vaxxer, is down with an illness that can’t possibly be COVID which doesn’t exist. Regardless, he has been sent to his own hotel room, will not be allowed outside without a mask (also something he doesn’t believe in), and a table has been placed for him on the terrace outside the wedding venue, and hopefully it will not rain. It has been pouring for days. If the entire family is missing, they will be represented by the fourteen litres (but they don’t do metric) of maple syrup they have brought from the libertarian north-east to contribute to the wedding.
Every Pakistani I have met in this country has complained to me about how lazy and work-shy white Australians are and have attributed it, variously, to convict ancestry, complacency from growing up in a stable country, and the easy availability of consumer credit. I would have thought it’s something to aspire to.