Tag Archives: Wedding

A Knot is Tied

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Just over seven years ago, after one poten­tial stu­dent house deal fell through, I asked around the Games Soci­ety to see if any­one was in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion. I met one girl who was strange and hyper­ac­tive and who was look­ing for other peo­ple to share a house with. She intro­duced me to a house and another poten­tial house­mate, and that house­mate pro­ceeded to intro­duce me to a night­club, an entire musi­cal genre, and another girl whom I imme­di­ately devel­oped a crush on. Lit­tle did I know then that the house would come to define my time at uni­ver­sity, and the peo­ple whom I turned to in des­per­a­tion to find a house would become some of my best friends.

A cou­ple of months later, the strange hyper­ac­tive girl asked me out. I, being shy, eas­ily break­able and largely ter­ri­fied of the oppo­site sex, said no. Via the medium of a cryp­tic Live­Jour­nal post.

She drifted out of my life for a year and a half, mov­ing away from my uni­ver­sity city while I applied myself to my stud­ies and my increas­ingly inap­pro­pri­ate crushes on other peo­ple. But then, that year and a half later, she was back in Southamp­ton for one week­end which began with fol­low­ing fairy paths, con­tin­ued with whisky and bit­ter tears, and ended up with that strange, hyper­ac­tive girl ask­ing me out for a sec­ond time. This time, I seem to recall, I said “yes”.

Uni­ver­sity fin­ished for me in the sum­mer of 2006, split­ting us fur­ther apart. But in Novem­ber of that year, we moved to Bournemouth together.

In 2007, we had a child. In 2008, we bought a flat.

Yet more years have passed. We have come a long way from being a strange, hyper­ac­tive girl and a ter­ri­fied boy who refused her advances. This Fri­day, the tenth of June in the year 2011, in the pres­ence of those friends from long ago and many more besides, we were married.

A Time to Panic

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Life passes slowly, when epic things lie ahead.

I have two full days ahead of me as a “free” man, before I am to be mar­ried to the only woman crazy enough to have me. And, nat­u­rally, I am pan­ick­ing so much that by Fri­day morn­ing I expect to have exploded in a shower of caf­feine and mis­cel­la­neous body parts.

I’m sure at this point I’m sup­posed to be ner­vous about my choice of wife; that I’d picked the wrong woman and was doom­ing myself to a life of unhap­pi­ness. Or some­thing. But the time for wor­ry­ing about that was a very long time ago.

Eric, Joseph and I

About this long ago.

No, this panic is merely a result of hav­ing to organ­ise the biggest thing I have ever organ­ised (by about a fac­tor of 4, in terms of peo­ple, or a fac­tor of 400 in terms of the pre­cip­i­tous fall in my bank bal­ance). The ser­vice is organ­ised, though we sent out 30 invites with the wrong time. The recep­tion is organ­ised, though if it rains we’ll be an hour early. The DJs haven’t replied since I told them “no soppy crap and no 90s boy bands”. Flow­ers might hap­pen at some point, and the cake maker hasn’t been in con­tact for weeks.

Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Talk are all abuzz with peo­ple ask­ing ques­tions; where they should be and when, what to buy, what to bring. The morn­ing of the wed­ding is shap­ing up to be a bizarre and con­vo­luted guest-shuffling exercise.

A wed­ding appears to be not so much about love, as spend­ing pots of cash on a great big party and going mad try­ing to make it all hap­pen. And how­ever it hap­pens, in the end, we’ll love each other just as much after­wards as before.

Eric and I

But maybe we’ll be peo­ple again, not insanely vibrat­ing beings hewn from raw ele­men­tal stress.

Adrift in Time

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As Mark pointed out to me, it’s prob­a­bly rather strange to pick for your Best Man some­one who you’ve seen only three times in as many years. But although some small part of my brain insists that some time has passed since I left uni­ver­sity, it’s eas­ily over­ruled by the rest.

I mean, grad­u­a­tion was about four weeks ago, right? And Joseph’s about three weeks old. Wait, what? Three years? Does not compute.

In that time I’ve made some friends, it’s true — and don’t get me wrong, they are good friends — but see­ing some­one once a week, or once a month, just doesn’t reg­is­ter in my brain as strongly as do those I lived with, even though the time I lived with them was long ago.

To my shame I’ve spo­ken to those Uni­ver­sity friends less and less as time has gone on. The major­ity I don’t even reg­u­larly IM any­more — we’ve become Twit­ter friends, Face­book friends, peo­ple who com­ment on each oth­ers’ blogs. I feel a strange kind of buzz talk­ing to any of them, even just over IM, but yet I barely do it. I bash out a 140-character reply to some tweet of theirs, and my need for con­tact with my best friends is sated for another few hours. Nor­mally I don’t feel too guilty about that, but some­times it hits me that I’ve been doing that for four long years, and then, as now, I realise just how bad that is.

So yes, it’s really bloody strange that what I think of as my best friends, and my Best Man-to-be among them, are really those friends that I talk to the least of all. But hav­ing iso­lated the cause of that as my own reluc­tance to start instant mes­sen­ger chats, at least I have some­thing I can work on.