Which question reminds me of something a priest once told me: seemingly St. Augustine once said something along the lines of "your childhood never goes away - where would it go to?". (The priest in question was officiating at my grandfather's funeral, and was taken with the badge on my leather jacket at the time, which read "It's never too late to have a happy childhood".) And now I have Bob Dylan's "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" running around my head, and a desire to re-read Robert Westall's "Futuretrack Five" - which I can't, because I don't own a copy. Gah. But it's funny about associations.
So. Yeah. Anyway. (I dreamed I was amongst the ones who put him out to death...) It's been a quiet enough week. Friday was Patrick's birthday so we went out for a few pints with a couple of friends - nothing planned, it just sort of happened. Niall is a complete fruitcake at times, but an utter sweetheart. Possessed of far too much energy and an overwhelming friendliness, which is why we ended up chattering away with two American girls whose flight home had been overbooked, and two random Finns. The Finns were extremely odd, in a quietly intense way. The Americans were very nice, despite being Evangelical Christians (they were over here to lend a hand to some Irish people who are setting up and Evangelical Christian organisation of some kind). I have nothing, I should point out, against Christians, but I do object to evangelising. However, they didn't evangelise at us, so that was all good. We spent some time explaining to them why the Irish name for Dublin is Baile Atha Cliath (basically, way back when, two different names were applied to the same settlement; the locals called it the Town of the Ford of the Hurdles and the Vikings called it Black Pool. The former stuck as the Irish name, the latter as the English one).
After all that debauchery (we then came home and drank whiskey and Niall fell asleep in mid-conversation), getting up at 10am on Saturday was un-fun. But necessary, because Saturday was the day of Paul and Anne's wedding. Paul is a very old friend (and ex-boyfriend) of mine, and a pretty old friend of Patrick's, and in consequence, we were invited to the entire do - church, drinks, meal, evening - the works! And the wedding was in Greystones, which is not exactly convenient for Coolock. Technically speaking, of course, the thing should have been in the bride's parish, but Anne apparently dislikes her local church, and if it's anything like most of the Roman Catholic churches in this city, I can't blame her. They're nearly all modern and exceptionally ugly. The one in Donneycarney, for instance, is a sort of very large box made of grubby mustard-coloured brick. The one in Donaghmede has no rivals that I know of; it looks as if some misguided fool built a pyramid of bottle-green tile, then chopped it up, and then put it back together wrong.
The wedding, anyway, was held in St. Patrick's (CofI) in Greystones, which is quite a pretty early Victorian job. So in order to get there by two, we had to be out of the house by twelve. And to do that, given showering, the fact that I had to do make-up and both of us had to iron garments, and I hadn't yet wrapped the wedding present...well, we had to get up at ten.
All was, in fact, achieved on time, and we were lucky enough to get a bus promptly - our local buses run allegedly on an every X minutes schedule (X varying depending on day and time), but there seems to be a temporally unstable black hole at the terminus which every so often eats the buses (on one memorable occasion, I sat at the next stop after the terminus for half an hour and watched six 27s, two 27Xs, and a very lost 42 head in towards the terminus - not one of them came out again!).
We were passing the mustard-brick box in Donneycarney when I remembered the wedding present, left behind in the sitting room. Oh well. Anyway, we made it to the station in plenty of time to get the DART to Greystones (not all of them go that far, so you have to be very careful about timing!). A couple of friends of ours got on at the next station, but didn't see us and got into a different carriage, so we had to wait to meet up till we finally got to Greystones. At which point we realised that not one of us had any idea how to get from the railway station to the church! Luckily, Patrick had the phone number of another friend who lives out there, and rang him for directions. Once they'd established which church Patrick wanted ("Oh, the Proddy one!"), it turned out to be pretty easy. Out of the station, hang a right, and keep going. There it is. And there, indeed, it was.
The ceremony was quite nice. The priest spent more time than I thought was necessary explaining the point of each step of the service (don't people go to weddings any more?), and the service itself was from the new Prayer Book, with which I Do Not Hold. I'm not a Christian now, but I was brought up in the Church of Ireland on the Book of Common Prayer, which is of similar vintage to the King James Bible, and I can't be having with these new-fangled translations. The language just doesn't have the same ring. We're having the Book of Common Prayer at our wedding, if I have to petition the Archbishop on bended knee! But aside from using the "wrong" prayer book (and the "wrong" Bible for the readings!), it was very nice. We had one of my favourite hymns, Be Thou My Vision and the readings were from the letter to the Corinthians (about how if you have not love, you have nothing) and of course the Wedding at Cana.
The menfolk were very nattily attired in striped trousers, blue satin waistcoats embroidered with flowers and vines in silvery grey, black dinner jackets, white shirts and blue silk cravats. I was a tad disappointed not to see Paul in a top hat, but of course you couldn't wear a top hat with a dinner jacket. Anne's dress was a rather lovely affair in cream satin, loose-fitting and high-waisted with a demi-train and a lace bolero. She has Cerebral Palsy and thus her spine is somewhat stooped, so a more traditional style would have been a disaster; as it was, she looked gorgeous. Her bridesmaids, unfortunately, were attired in dusky pink georgette; calf-length dresses with shoe-string straps and matching blouse/jacket things over the top. The garments looked like something one's elderly auntie would wear to a wedding, and thus seemed most out of place on bridesmaids! Paul's six-year-old daughter, Patricia, however, looked quite adorable as a flower-girl in a dress styled similarly to Anne's, except that Patricia's had a ballet-length skirt with a bit of a hoop. The other sartorial disappointment was Paul's mother; I had been greatly looking forward to seeing her in a hat (hats being quite de riguer for the mothers of the bride and groom), but she refused. She did, however, look very well in her long, narrow, dark-blue satin affair, with Chinese collar and shadow print.
After the service we had the usual mill about in front of the church thing, while people took photographs, had quick cigarettes, and tried to organise who was taking who to the hotel for the reception. Patrick and I ended up going with Paul's mother and his brother's girlfriend, and were some of the first to arrive. There followed the usual interval of sitting about having drinks, chatting to friends (luckily for us, about half a dozen other friends of our circle had also been invited to the full affair; trying to make conversation with random strangers is something I find, well, trying!), and waiting for the food to happen.
At length it did, and we all moved to the dining room, where Patrick and I found ourselves seated with one friend and a random bunch of strangers - all friends of Anne's, I gathered. This is a Tradition at weddings; Bride's friends/family and Groom's friends/family must be thoroughly mixed up at the meal, such that no more than half of any one table knows the other half. I am not sure whether this is in order to promote inter-familial friendship, or to make it easier to start fights. *grin* Anyway, the people we were seated with turned out to be a reasonably congenial bunch. I had a moment of wondering whether we should be insulted by our placement; we were almost as far from the high table as it was possible to get (and still be in the dining room), but common sense asserted itself; relations take precedence over friends at these affairs, and had probably filled up all of the closer tables.
During the meal, Patrick and I played our usual game of awarding or deducting points for the food, service, etc. (We do this any time we're eating out.) On the plus side, we awarded points for the mushroom soup (quite delicious, and I don't much like soup at all, and Patrick specifically doesn't like mushroom soup, but we both liked this), for the Provencale sauce on the chicken (very flavoursome; many Provencales are terribly bland), and for the cauliflower (cooked perfectly, which is not always the case!). On the minus side, we deducted points for the Provencale sauce (a bit too watery, for all its flavour), for the carrots (overcooked - yuck!), and for a couple of the waitresses, who served over the wrong shoulder of the diner (should be the left, wasn't always). The profiteroles and the coffee were both good, but not special enough to warrant points.
The speeches were good, funny and not too long, and then came the moving of those tables which had been placed on the dance-floor, the migration of people from their assigned tables to where their friends were, and the arrival of those invited only to the afters. Patrick and I ended up on the far side of the room from where we'd started, with a bunch of other gamer-types (surprise!).
Paul and Anne opened the dancing to Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight"; it was very sweet to see Paul singing the whole song just to Anne as they danced (Paul, by the way, spent most of the entire event looking exceptionally pleased with himself, while Anne spent a lot of it looking as if she wished people would look at someone else besides her!). They'd got a DJ rather than a band (often a good idea, given some of the bands I've heard playing at weddings!), and had apparently given him Instructions. He did play a regrettable (from my point of view) amout of modern pop, but he also played a lot of the older stuff (80s and back), and some heavy metal - well, Paul is an old metaller. I joined about half a dozen of the lads, and wee Patricia, to headbang to "Paranoid" - my neck's not quite recovered yet. Patricia's new title is "The Littlest Headbanger", and terribly cute she looked too. The kid has an excellent sense of rhythm (she was dancing a lot, not just to the metal stuff), and looks to me like a candidate for dance classes of some kind sometime soon. Patrick (an ex-dancer) agrees with me.
The rest of the evening passed as these things generally do, with drinking and dancing and talking and making the arch for the bride and groom to leave...though we were rather annoyed at the DJ for failing to end the evening with the National Anthem - if we don't have the Anthem, how do we know it's time to go?! Though after the DJ quit, a bunch of people at the next table started a sing-song...which included an impressively condensed version of "The Green Fields of France"; they got the first verse, and then squashed the other three into one! All fun though. Some people then went on to the hotel's night-club, but we'd had enough by then (it was past two!), and were lucky enough to get the offer of a lift back into town, whence a taxi home would be much cheaper than from Greystones. So we took it, and then Brian's brother was kind (and mad) enough to drive us all the way home. What a nice man!
Fell into bed, and it was a good thing training was cancelled the next (or same, technically) day, due to the wedding, Q-Con which was also on that weekend, and the second Moot which, too, was on just then. We really weren't fit for anything on Sunday!
Bad news from Moot 2; the second of our group lost his character. Corthar, High Smith of Armengar and all-round good warrior/loyal comrade is no more. He was, apparently, eaten by a demon. And to pile bad on top of worse, something called the Mordred Device has seemingly been re-activated; any Incantation magic now performed will have the nasty side-effect of rapidly aging (often to the point of death) the nearest member(s) of any of the Elder Races (dwarves, elves, etc.) - even if "nearest" is thousands of miles away. Needless to say, my character is less than impressed, both because that's Not A Nice Thing To Do, and because it means she can't use her powers until the thing is deactivated again.
Meanwhile, at work, being stuck for anything else to do, I've been reorganising the Master Files. This involves a lot of moving documents from box to box, and then moving the boxes from place (under my desk) to place (cupboard on the landing). My arms hurt.
posted by Dorian at
9:32 PM
