In general, I'm a fan of multiculturalism, and the give-and-take it entails. It's great that Britons have embraced Indian food, that R&B tracks sprinkle the Top 40 and that many minority groups have, in return, embraced great British traditions such as drinking until you pass out.

But I must draw the line at weddings. And this is because when it comes to matrimonial ceremonies, British is best. And I have thought this ever since I attended my first English wedding, at a register office in Walsall, ten years ago.

As I come from a Punjabi community, in which weddings can last longer than the Sudanese civil war, it was a revelation for me to discover that the whole thing could be over in a couple of hours - stunning to realise that it was possible for two people to get married without guests having to endure three days of sitting with moustachioed strangers discussing the merits of the Audi A8 v those of the BMW 7 series.

But in recent years I have watched in despair as English weddings have become just as tediously lengthy. Of the dozen that I have attended during the past three years, half - if you add up the length of the engagement party, the stag weekend, the pre-wedding dinner, the ceremony, the signing of the registers, the interminable mill between the church service and the reception, the speeches and the post-wedding breakfast - have given Sikh weddings, not to mention the Doha Round of trade talks, a run for their money. Increasingly, couples seem determined to make the happiest day of their life last an actual lifetime.

And, in part, the trend is simply a symptom of a wider one that I have complained about before: prolixity. In the 19th century Sir Arthur Helps, a clerk of the Privy Council, remarked that “almost all human affairs are tedious”. He continued: “Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long.” And today the comment is more relevant than ever. Steven Spielberg movies, Salman Rushdie novels, Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, Booker Prize so-called shortlists, computer games, training courses, working weeks, conferences, dinner parties, meetings, this sentence, life itself, are all too long. But the increasing prolixity of weddings is also, I think, partly to blame on the media. People read about lavish weddings in Hello! magazine, watch Four Weddings and a Funeral and see glamorous ceremonies depicted in episodes of Neighbours and want a piece of the action. Which is fine; after all, it's their stupid money, and the media - or, more specifically, Bollywood - is one of the reasons why Asian weddings bang on for so long. With effort, I can even see that it's kind of sweet that so many couples want a wedding straight out of Hum Aapke Hain Koun. But the problem is that it is extraordinarily tedious for everyone who is obliged to attend.

So if you're planning a wedding, here's a bit of advice: halve the length of it - then halve it again. And you might then just be approaching the kind of length that most of your guests would deem to be enjoyable. Just because your love for each other is eternal doesn't mean that your nuptials should be. After all, no guest ever attended a wedding and came back saying: “God, that was great, but it was too short.”

For me, the prolixity of it all is made additionally agonising by the fact that most weddings would be so easy to edit. All you would need to do is to have one poem fewer by W.B. Yeats during the service, one violin recital fewer after the service and one speech fewer during the reception. Then convert the stag weekend into a stag night and you would nearly be there.

Indeed, is there any more depressing phrase in the English language - apart, of course, from “wedding list” - than “stag weekend”? It epitomises everything that is moronic about our age: cheap and nasty foreign air travel; budget hotels; lad culture; binge-drinking; compulsory fun; meeting your friends' friends; prolixity. Obviously, should of any of the mates whose stag weekends I have attended in recent years be reading this, I'm not talking about you - we had a great time! Especially the bit when we stuck that thing up his thing, and left him tied to the wotsit. God, that was hilarious. But, in general, I find them about as enjoyable as brain surgery.

And because I appear so visibly miserable during these weekends - well, even more visibly miserable than normal - I generally spend the entire time being asked whether I'm all right. Or rather - because homophobia is the medium via which inebriated heterosexual men communicate - I normally spend stag weekends being asked whether I'm gay.

I have been asked whether I'm gay by a friend of a friend who couldn't understand why any man would want to drink wine instead of lager. I have been asked whether I'm gay by a friend of a friend in a provincial strip club who couldn't understand why the sight of a dead-eyed woman mechanically gyrating to a Celine Dion track didn't get me going. I have been asked whether I'm gay by a friend of a friend who couldn't understand why I was wearing a blazer over the compulsory stag-weekend uniform of shirt overhanging a pair of jeans.

And you know what? I'm not gay. But I would still consider it preferable to pluck my eyebrows, sprout a goatee, put on a pair of PVC hotpants and spend an entire evening watching The Sound of Music with members of the Pet Shop Boys fan club than endure the torture of most stag weekends and, for that matter, be afflicted by the spirit-crushing self-indulgence of most modern weddings.
sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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