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Sport 1: Spring 1988

Wedding Xerox: Prince Andrew and Sarah Fergusson

page 58

Wedding Xerox: Prince Andrew and Sarah Fergusson

This could be a banquet hall, it is so large. The wedding couple have been centred exactly, as if to deflect the desire of the eye to travel skirting boards nearly half man-size off the page.

This hall of state is a deserted house wandered into. Emptied of comings and goings it has become ingrown. You smile here to remember your 'I'.

This chamber, the brilliant dress unfolding itself down stairs, are trappings to enhance size. Yet Fergie and Andrew are diminished. That dress might as well be headless, a ghost dress of Windsor with reinforced cups. Or Fergie is the phantom, a guest appearance hosted by the dress. She is an image nervous of someone out there about to switch channels. Press a button and she will flicker out. So she smiles to remind us of an 'I' that we all share. But we are also the human-vacuum that she smiles at in fear.

This xerox is over-cooked. Skin tone has melted into the black of the curtain. What particulars are left, the smiles, the awesome wedding dress, suffice. The message is all here in silver-white shorthand.

Yet sunburn and royalty are incongruous. Perhaps these are Americans; buying up the props of English dynasty, romping through the trappings of Windsor, made benign by too many vitamins.