The most memorable toast I have heard was my about-to-be-mother-in-law's toast the night before I married her final daughter, a daughter who had been engaged once before with great fanfare to another guy whom she almost married but was saved from marrying by a roaring argument in France just before the wedding.
My about-to-be-mother-in-law stood up, on the night before her daughter married me, held her glass aloft and sighed, 'Let's just hope this one comes off', which sent my many brothers into hysterics and the about-to-be-bride wailing from the room.
That toast stays with me, as you can imagine. But I have heard stunning and stuttered toasts, muddled and moving toasts, hilarious and haunting toasts.
Another entertaining one was in a dark ancient wooden smoky book-dense club in Boston, many years ago, when I was there as a member of an obscure society devoted to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which a snake plays a crucial part in a crucial story, and a famous Boston newspaperman stood to salute the snake: Here's to the snake, who didn't have a pit to hiss in.
This still makes me laugh, as does that scholarly society's firm tradition, to this day, of a whole series of toasts before dinner (to the snake! to the detective! to his best friend! to his worst enemy! to the woman he loved! to Queen Victoria!), which tends to leave the company gibbering before the giblets arrive.
Then there is the toast offered at my wedding (which did take place, I have witnesses), spoken by my friend Pete, who was shivering shy as he stood to deliver, but then boomed the room with Michaleen Flynn's wedding toast from the film The Quiet Man: 'May their days be long and full of happiness; may their children be many and full of health; and may they live in peace and freedom,, which elicited a roar I have not forgotten.
My mum burst into tears, but I think that was because she detests The Quiet Man, in which Maureen O'Hara is threatened with a stick.
This Irish vein reminds me of my grandfather, who was from County Clare and who grew up speaking only Gaelic, and whose toast at the table was always go mbeire muid beo ar an am seo arís, which translates roughly as let's hope for one more year, and of my other grandfather, who was from County Wicklow, and whose toast