Preparing for Wedding Part 1

By nine o'clock on Sunday morning, Ernest Teucher had reached a definitive conclusion: planning a wedding was fundamentally more chaotic, politically fraught, and structurally unsound than laying three hundred leagues of steel through a peat bog.

The realization offended him on a purely professional level.

A railway was governed by immutable physical laws. One required capital, parliamentary rights-of-way, ballast stone, timber sleepers, rolled rail, high-pressure steam locomotives, and an engineering corps that understood gravity and drainage. The objective remained gloriously, mathematically simple: take goods and passengers from Point A to Point B without the rolling stock tumbling into a ravine.

A wedding possessed no such elegance. It was an amorphous sea of competing aesthetics, ancient familial grievances, and social posturing.