2008 Weddings -- #2

The second of the year's weddings (well, the ones I'm invited to, at any rate -- I imagine there must have been others) happened last Sunday at West Quantoxhead in Somerset[1]. It was another thoroughly pleasant affair -- the weather put a rather literal dampener on the proceedings (and the vows were amusingly heralded by an ominous squall), but the rather large indoor venue was ample to contain us all.

As is customary at these events, the bride and groom seemed very happy. In addition there were lots of lovely friends, and pleasant veggie food, and drink, and ceilidh dancing. Possibly because of the astonishingly generous profusion of the penultimate item, the complexities of the last proved somewhat beyond my grasp, but B. seemed to enjoy herself with a succession of partners, which is always nice.

This was the first wedding I've been to which featured rival speech-length sweepstakes, a tradition which I inaugurated many years ago now[2]. I feel both proud and humbled (especially since I won one and lost the other, having hedged on 32 and 42 minutes respectively. Still, I got £19 out of it.) I'm considering making up bingo-cards for next time, with phrases like "be upstanding", "four years old", "N.'s first girlfriend" and "into our family" on them.

In addition to plentiful and varied drink, I enjoyed some fine cigars with friends. Cigars at weddings are not only permissible but almost mandatory, unlike cigarettes which border on the gauche. They do, however, act as a gateway drug -- someone had brought snuff, which I'd never tried before, to stick up our noses. Goodness, that's an odd sensation.

After the reception we returned to our hotel with various other guests, purchased a bottle of vodka and sat around until 4 a.m. playing a traditional English swearing-game[3] and talking mainly about -- if memory serves -- gardening and babies. I forget whether the two were alleged to be connected.

Whether it was because of the cigars, snuff, drink or late night, I felt somewhat rough the next day. Still -- hurrah for weddings! Only three (or possibly just two) more to go this year.


[1] I hadn't previously realised that St Audrey -- after whom West Quantoxhead is alternatively named, and from the shoddy reputation of whose saint's-day market we derive the word "tawdry" -- was the same person as St Ethelreda, and indeed St Æthelthryth.
[2] At least, I'm fairly sure it was me. I'm open to correction, as it's possible that the wedding booze has blunted my memory there.
[3] I've spoiler-protected the game rules to protect innocent eyes -- highlight the whitespace to read: Think of film titles, and try to work out whether they're funny with either "Up My Arse" or "On My Cock" stuck on the end. Eg Shooting Fish Up My Arse, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Up My Arse, The Hands of Orlac On My Cock, etc. We worked out that E.M. Forster adaptations are particularly productive, viz: Howards End Up My Arse, A Passage to India Up My Arse, A Room with a View Up My Arse, Where Angels Fear to Tread On My Cock. It's, er, fun when you're drunk.

2008 Weddings -- #1 in a Series of at Least 4

Last Sunday Kate and Silk, of whom you may have heard me speak (almost invariably in the context of beer, to nobody's particular surprise) tied the knot and got married in the Town Hall in Oxford, where B. and I held our wedding reception many years ago.

(For the usual reasons of busyness I failed to blog the relevant stag party a few weeks ago, where Silk and some sixteen other men in the 25-40 age bracket met at the stone circle in Avebury, wandered some ten miles through the thick scrubland of Wiltshire then drank a great deal of unsurprising beer in the middle of bloody nowhere. The plan of meeting for a drink at the stone circle was more sensible than it sounds, given that Avebury is the only stone circle in England which encircles a village, and more pertinently a pub.

It's a particular shame I missed the opportunity to blog about this, as I was going to use the title "Only Us Menhir". You'll just have to pretend I used it and react accordingly.)

Silk and Kate made the elementary error of asking me not only to read at the ceremony, but also to write something special for the occasion. Having tried before to write a sincere celebration of marriage as a sacrament and discovered that it came out a bit rubbish, I wasn't going to be tempted down that route again.

Here's what I read (or rather, since it requires a certain amount of comedy business with tones of voice and pieces of paper, performed):

CONTRATHALAMION
by Philip Purser-Hallard

To Silk and Kate, with love
on the happy occasion of their wedding –
Sunday 4 May 2008.

Let not the marriage of true minds –
but you’ve heard that one. Let me talk
instead about the many kinds
of daily strife which make it awk-
ward to stay married, once those first
impediments are past. I’ve made
a list of those I find the worst.
My wife… helped. First – the marmalade.
No, hang on, that’s page 2. Let’s see...
You may find things that you yourself
put somewhere safe will later be
somewhere absurd, like on the shelf
where mug-trees live. Unless, you know,
they’re mug-trees, and that’s where they go.

Toenail clippings, rather than
the bin, might turn up in your bed,
your trousers, or your frying-pan.
A book that should be under Z
in fiction – a Zelazny, say –
you’ll find instead is in the car,
the bath, the fridge, or under J.
You’ll wonder where your pliers are,
and as for DVD remotes –
I’m ranting now. Perhaps it’s best
if I just give you all my notes,
and spare these charming folk the rest.
(You may think I’m exaggerating.
See what you think in 2018.)

© Philip Purser-Hallard 2008

(I'll be adding this to the website in due course, as soon as I can decide whether to put it among the poetic juvenilia or the mature prose, or to create a new category for it or what. It's about time I updated the site, given that the last time that happened seems to have been last year. [Edit to add: now updated.])

The wedding was the first of at least four, possibly five, that B. and I'll be attending this year. The bride and groom looked very very happy, and in Silk's case unwontedly smart (Kate looked gorgeous, but that's less unusual). It was, as ever, thoroughly lovely to catch up with many old friends, together with their partners and in one case progeny.

The three speeches, incredibly, were only 13 minutes 30 seconds long between them, meaning that B., who'd taken a risk with 14 minutes, won the sweepstake. My guess was nearly twice that.

The wedding breakfast was followed by punting (in which I wisely didn't partake) and board games (in which I equally wisely did -- Hive is fantastic and I need to buy it as a matter of urgency), music and dancing and at least four different types of cheese. Very nice wine, as well, which I didn't drink far too much of -- indeed, the only areas in which I disgraced myself were (inevitably) my dancing, and succumbing to the temptation to have a quick cigarette before leaving. Bad Phil.

Generally a very successful day, though, and one which would have achieved high marks if we'd kept up our scoring system. Roll on Sunday 25th in Taunton.

Festival Blog: Day 3A

Still recovering from Greenbelt -- immense fun though it is, the persistent lack of sleep and constant need to wander aimlessly around the festival site destruct-testing your socks can have deleterious effects.

My reports from Greenbelt for Surefish are missing the actual, rather than speculative, events of my final day-and-a-bit of festival. So, after filing my copy for "Day 2" and (the entirely hypothetical) "Day 3", this is what I actually did:

1. Went back to the petting zoo, where B. and I cuddled a duckling and a guinea-pig, stroked a donkey and some goats and admired two pigs.

2. Spent a while listening to Reem Kalani at the main stage. Despite her astonishingly powerful voice, her wailing violin-accompanied singing was unexpectly soothing. Or maybe I was just very tired.

Hell

3. Attended Fundamentalism, Ikon's alternative worship (or rather "experiment in theodrama"). This was every bit as remarkable as I expected. Ikon's deliberately destabilising, questioning, deconstructionist approach to worship is oddly reassuring, in suggesting that God is present in doubt and absence as much as in faith and revelation. Some people (including, inevitably, some of its members) go so far as to describe the group's worship style as "pretentious", but its intellectual foundations are a good fit for my own current musings about God. And the group demonstrated that they're by no means humourless by picketing their own service with signs claiming that everyone involved was going to Hell.

I'm now reading Ikon founder Pete Rollins' book of theology, How (Not) to Speak of God, which I picked up at the Greenbelt bookshop. It is, again, remarkable. I may say more about it in due course.

3. Stopped briefly by a much less successful (read: "a bit bollocks, actually") experiment in "scripture meditation", then went to bed.

4. Got up early and went with B. to R. and J.'s wedding in Staffordshire. As I've said here this was generally lovely, but the high density of children in the congregation made it surprisingly difficult to hear what was going on. It was the first second wedding (as it were) of a friend that I've been to, and the minister (assuming I heard her correctly) said some very wise-seeming things about renewal, transformation and second chances.

Knob

R. and J. themselves were very happy, R. looking particularly gorgeous in a strapless silk wedding dress thing [1], and there were some people there it was lovely to see after so long. Unfortunately we had to scarper back to the festival after the Pimms and canapés, but our brief time there was very nice indeed.

5. Arrived back on site in time for the Othona Community's One World worship, which I came away having very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I was delighted to find an even vaguely interfaith service at Greenbelt, which often seems to have a blind spot in its liberalism when it comes to learning from non-Christian faith traditions.

On the other hand, Othona's worship style seemed to revolve around improvisational chanting and interpretive body-movement, which I couldn't possibly participate in without feeling a complete knob [2]. This came as something of a disappointment, frankly.

6. FAFFED ABOUT and entirely failed to do any of the various other interesting things I could have done until about 8:30, when B. and I managed to stumble upon a very funny act by Paul Kerensa, who was on his way home from performing his comedy show Back to the Futon at the Edinburgh Festival. We particularly appreciated his account of being caught speeding at 88 mph in a DeLorean, and his use of (what he assured us was) his joint degree in Mathematics and Film Studies to prove that 99.6% of men were called Malcolm [3].

His warm-up act also had a joke which will entertain vigornian, if no-one else:

Q: Why are pirates called pirates?
A: Because they ARRRRRRHHHHH!

7. Went with B. and R. (NB: Not the R. who got married, of course -- that would have been mad) to Last Orders, the late-night magazine-show summing-up of the best of the festival, where we saw Paul Kerensa again. (His jokes were just as funny the second time. Or possibly I was just very, very tired.) Left when it became clear that none of us could keep our eyes open any more.

8. Slept in a tent. It's difficult to emphasise sufficiently what a huge achievement this was without sounding like a complete wimp, possibly for the obvious reason.

Suffice it to say that at Greenbelt in 1993 a combination of torrential rain, strong winds and calf-deep mud gave me such a horrendous experience of camping that I foreswore it, and Greenbelt itself, for the next ten years. Only the location of the modern festival at Cheltenham Racecourse, and the availability of bed-and-breakfast accommodation on a nearby student campus, succeeded in enticing me back.

Organic

Unfortunately, this year I'd booked my accommodation when I thought I'd have a job to get back to first thing on Tuesday morning, so when it became clear I could stay the Monday night, the only place available for actual sleepage was the tent B. was using.

The cramped space, muddy exterior and disturbing, almost organic softness of the walls caused me some minor palpitations, but I managed to sleep OK, which constitutes a personal milestone. It didn't persuade me not to B&B it next year, though.

9. Helped B. to pack up said tent, got a train home while she drove (there being no actual space for me in the car with all the camping gear), comforted two bereft cats and slept for not nearly long enough. Got up, went to bed and did the same again.

10. Typed this.

Now I'm going to eat some food, probably, watch some TV and go to bed again. With luck, I'll perhaps be not-tired-any-more in time for the Organic Food Festival on Saturday.


[1] R. was, incidentally, the bride.
[2] Ho ho, yes.
[3] Clue: His starting premises were "Malcolm X = 1992 film" and "X Men = 2000 film". You start by solving each equation for X...

You Can't Climb Twice Into the Same Attic

Discovered last week while sorting through a box found in my parents' attic (in approximate chronological order of initial acquisition):

• A battered, shapeless, much-worn and extensively-repaired knitted toy of indeterminate species named Eggy, whom I loved exhaustively, and who's now sitting with B.'s equally shabby teddy bear on a shelf in the bedroom.
• A commemorative coin from the wedding of that charming Windsor couple, whose marriage turned out to be such an example to us all.
• A box of conjuring tricks endorsed by his eminence Paul Daniels (now en route to orphans in Romania or, er, somewhere).
• A clutch of smurves, who I'm fairly sure used to belong to my brother (and were therefore left behind for him to claim).
• Awards from my final prep school prize day, at which I seem to have pretty much swept the board. What a creep I was.
• Two Zoids, specifically Slitherzoid and Slime. I'm fairly sure there's still a Krark, Prince of Darkness up there somewhere.
• Various school exercise books, most of them now discarded but the English one (containing various bits of juvenilia) kept for novelty value.
• An album of photos from approximately 1986-88, showing me and a number of people I know -- and, in one case, Toyah Wilcox -- all looking scandalously young. (I used to wear ties to parties -- sometimes even bow ties. The horror, the horror...) Now shelved with our other photo albums.
• The poster and programme for a school production of Alan Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind. I was Gerald. (NB Ayckbourn's homepage is here, but Firefox seems to really hate it.)
• A book of stamps designed by some artist I'd never heard of (and still haven't), which I bought and kept on the grounds that one day it might be valuable. I suppose one day it might.
• Two bulging files of handwritten letters from various friends, showing how prolific we used to be as correspondents before we discovered email. These will, I'm sure, one day become an invaluable resource for a biographer of somebody I knew between roughly 1989 and 1994.

Except where noted, all of the above are going straight up into our attic.

Also acquired while with my parents: a noticeable paunch, courtesy of my Mum's culinary generosity. Oops.

Otherwise, and obviously aside from the wedding, the trip to Worthing was quiet. The parents took me, B., brother and sister-in-law out for a very convivial meal at a restaurant called The Fish Factory -- which appears to have an almost non-existent web profile, did much better vegetarian food than you'd expect from the name, and even had some vaguely interesting international bottled lagers.

Generally, though, the most interesting thing to do in Worthing is go to Brighton instead. So after a picnic at Devil's Dyke on Saturday, we saw the Rex Whistler exhibition at Brighton Museum, called in at the vegetarian shoe shop and wandered up and down the Lanes in a desultory sort of way. I always enjoy Brighton's bohemian ambience, and being there in the immediate aftermath of the Gay Pride march probably helped with that.

As I said to B., it's looking now as if the next weddings we'll be going to in Worthing will be those of our nieces and / or nephews, and they don't even exist yet. Hurry up and procreate, brother.

Unbridled Pleasure

Until fairly recently -- when we decided it was altogether too much work when we were supposed to be enjoying ourselves -- B. and I had a system for scoring weddings.

This was a percentage grade, based on numbers out of ten awarded for the following:

1. Ceremony venue, including decoration and the like
2. Ceremony
3. Appearance of principals, including costuming (with points deducted for any bridesmaids below the age of 12, and any page-boys whatsoever)
4. Unobtrusiveness or nonexistence of photography
5. Reception venue
6. Quality / quantity of food
7. Quality / quantity of drink
8. Wit and brevity of speeches
9. Quality of entertainment
10. Company

This was always subject to alteration and refinement -- there were certainly times when we conflated 1. and 5., and others when we expanded 6. and 7. into four independent categories. We may have sometimes included inappropriately faffy criteria like "general ambience".

Indeed, part of the reason the system didn't work terribly well in practice was that we could never keep our criteria consistent from one wedding to the next, and that unless we wrote the scores down at the time (and before we'd come to a full appreciation of point 7.), we'd never remember those either.

In any case, we didn't grade either of the two weddings we were at last week. At the first it wouldn't have been appropriate, since the bride and groom had done the whole thing on a shoestring, squeezing in at the nearest church on a Tuesday, hosting the reception in their flat and garden, and asking all their friends to contribute food, drink, flowers, hairdressing etc according to ability.

And at the second we'd been very strictly forbidden by the bride to do anything of the kind.

But -- and this is the point towards which I'm rather vacantly meandering -- both events would have scored highly, according to any version of the system.

If we had been scoring. Which we really weren't, honestly.

Tuesday's bride, Z., was one of the very oldest of my old friends, whom I've known since we were in the region of six (me) and ten (her), and to whom I apparently endeared myself for life by telling her her leg-warmers looked like "mutant tights". Indeed, I was down on the order of service (I read the prayers of intercession) as "Read by Phil Hallard [sic], Z.'s oldest friend". Amusingly, her husband W., whom she met through their mutual passion for Civil War battle reenactment, is about eight years younger than I am.

I'm not going to detail Z. and W.'s performance in each criterion, but all were pretty impressive given the circumstances, and some (the decoration of the garden, for instance) were remarkably accomplished. The veggie food was limited in scope, but not so in quantity (and B. and I had managed to find a rather nice Lebanese café round the corner for lunch, so we weren't desperate). I'm the only friend from those days whom Z. has kept in touch with, so people I knew -- her parents aside -- were a bit thin on the ground. And we had to leave to get a train back to Bristol before the entertainment got under way... but still, the whole occasion was very wonderful.

It was also one of the gayest weddings I've been to, with the best man, numerous guests and (not particularly covertly) one of the clergy all being of the dorothyophilic persuasion. Apparently W.'s stag night involved his friends taking him to a gay club "to keep him out of trouble" -- a potentially risky strategy, I'd have thought, but one which evidently paid off.

As I've said, Z. led us in procession through the streets of North London in her bridal gown, receiving appropriate honks and whistles from spectators en route. Which is very her.

Friday's bride, M., was another old friend (but not as old as Z., and also younger). She's still in touch with many people I ought to be better at keeping in contact with myself, and whom it was desperately lovely to be able to see and get drunk with again. The ceremony was in our home town of Worthing, with the reception afterwards within sight of Arundel Castle, so that added nostalgia value as well.

M.'s new husband is a very nice chap (as indeed is Z.'s), so it was pleasing to see them so happy to be together. And M.'s father suffered a very severe stroke a few years ago, so it was very heartening to see him able to walk up the aisle with her, and later to propose a toast.

The food (veggie included) was very nice indeed, and either the disco was a particularly splendid one or else I was in an almost unprecedently good mood. I spent large swathes of the evening dancing, anyway, which as B. will testify is generally something I do only if a medium-to-high voltage is being run through me. The rest of the time B. and I spent sharing a table with the next couple who are due to get married[*], with frequent congenial visits from the Chief-Usher-cum-M.C., one of the bridesmaids and various others.

Anyway. I realise most of you don't know any of these people, and I don't mean to bang on. The point is, both were hugely enjoyable occasions, where I got to see people I love being very happy, and was therefore happy myself.

And all without any need to run a sweepstake on the duration of the speeches.


[*] Of the three weddings I'm going to this year, all are this month, and all are on weekdays. I'll let you know how the last one went after Bank Holiday Monday.

Inter-Nuptial Stopover

Well, the London wedding went very well -- the happy couple led us all in a procession through the streets from ceremony to reception, which I think appealed to the bride's innate theatricality. We're off to Sussex shortly for the second hitching of the week. I'll blog them in more detail next week sometime.

The article is now written and accepted. I'll go into more detail on that next week as well, but suffice it to say I'm very very happy on that score.

Have a good weekend, all.

That Will be All

Damn. I was going to post a blog update today, ahead of the midweek weddings I'm attending tomorrow and Friday.

However, I was then asked to write an article for a national newspaper [*]. Quickly. And I'm away all day tomorrow for the aforementioned wedding. So I'm afraid this blog's going to have to wait.

On the plus side, though -- woohoo!


[*] OK, so the small print is that they want to see it before they commit to publishing. Or indeed paying. Still, I believe the "woohoo" stands.