The Peltz-Beckhams wanting a second wedding because the first one wasn’t perfect shows they’ve missed the point of marriage

After spending the guts of €3.4m on a wedding less than a year ago, the pair want to stage a second ceremony. An even more lavish one, by all accounts.

The reason? She wants to have a “positive”, “happy” day after the “stress” of dealing with wedding planners and, per one niggling rumour, her interfering in-laws.

A ‘source’ close to Peltz-Beckham says she found her first wedding event a “nightmare”. What’s more, it has had an “impact” on the couple’s relationship.

Rewind via time’s giant wheel to last April and the Peltz-Beckham wedding looked, to my untrained eye at least, picture-perfect on the pages of Vogue.

I’m looking hard to find the nightmare scenario, but no, everything looked perfect. And more crucially, Brooklyn and Nicola did what they were there to do, which was to exchange vows and commit to each other in front of family and friends. Job done.

When it comes to weddings, ‘nightmare’ is a relative term, I guess. Ask most married couples about their big day and you’re almost certain to hear about how one of the many moving parts came undone. But can we really, really not make wedding retakes a thing?

In the post-pandemic landscape, I’ve noticed wedding sequels are on the rise. Couples who could only invite a handful of guests to their Covid-era wedding are opting to have a wider celebration, without Government guidelines or restrictions, so that everyone can celebrate their marriage.

And I’ve known several couples who have had one wedding ceremony and then another while nodding to another religion/culture or at a separate location so more loved ones could be involved.

And that’s all grand. What I draw the line at is wanting to have a second ceremony because they thought the vibe at their first one was somehow ‘off’ a bit. That you didn’t spend every minute of the day in ecstasy. Or, if you’re like Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, having three ceremonies because you want to ride the wave of attention for all it’s worth. 

The Peltz-Beckham scenario absolutely reeks of entitlement and excessiveness, not to mention attention-seeking. They appear to have missed the point of a wedding entirely. It’s called a ‘big day’, singular, for a reason.

The point of a wedding is not to be the centre of attention or to come away with an eye-poppingly beautiful set of photos. It’s about getting a marriage off the ground. And the work involved in that goes well beyond a single day.

Let’s face it, if you’re a young couple who is focused more on how perfect your wedding was than on the graft needed to keep a marriage in decent condition, no amount of Vogue coverage or confetti is ever going to help you. ‘Sage-burning’ your marriage with another €3.4m ceremony is not the way to make a marriage work.

Brooklyn and Nicola appear to have forgotten they’ve done the important bit — the only important bit. They’ve committed to each other. The rest — the first dance, the garter, the cake — is all just window dressing.

Blushing your way down the aisle again and going through that whole rigmarole doesn’t do much more than show marriage up as a charade.

Donal Skehan gets a taste of the housing crisis

Time once was that a prolific TV chef with several bestseller books and brand ambassadorships would have lived a very comfortable and financially stress-free life, usually moving into a palatial home on several acres with relatively little fuss or ceremony.

But we are not in the 80s anymore, Toto.

This week, Donal Skehan posted a jubilant social media post about buying his first family home after renting for 17 years. Like many his age, he’d been moved from pillar to post as a renter, and hinted that the road to home ownership wasn’t without tumult.

He had even evidently resorted to that most modern of phenomena — manifesting — to make it happen. Now, it’s likely that Skehan’s road to home ownership hasn’t exactly been like most people’s.

He appears to have bought a home near his hometown of Howth, which is a neighbourhood far beyond the financial reach of most first-time buyers.

He said the house is “tiny”, but this can mean different things to different people. Yet after being outbid on one home, he admitted that “it can be hard to watch someone announce their news about buying a house” — something most people trying to get a foothold on the property ladder can relate to.

It’s safe to say that for all his myriad achievements, Skehan is still beholden to 2023’s crazy market prices, just like the rest of us.

Former drug-taking TDs rank high for honesty

While most TDs seem to have plead the fifth when asked about drug use, I was pleasantly surprised to find a handful of them — among them Hildegarde Naughton, Neasa Hourigan and Eoin Ó Broin — stick their necks over the parapet on what drugs they’d done before they got to public office.

Of those that responded to questioning from the Sunday Independent, most said they’d never taken drugs. This, despite TD Dessie Ellis alleging that “you see [cocaine] everywhere, it’s even in Dáil Éireann”. In the toss-up between being honest and hypocritical, I’d much rather the former.​