I have rediscovered my drinking mojo.
Dave, Martin and I drove down* to Wetherby on Friday evening through torrential rain that recalled the Journey Into Terror from last year's road trip. Just north of Newcastle the rain eased off a bit and we stopped briefly to, as Dave put it, "snack my bitch up". It became apparent later, once we were safely ensconced in Wetherby's New Inn, that a Bacon Double Cheeseburger doesn't have sufficient calorific content to defeat six pints of Tetley's. Bitter? Why yes. I felt positively subhuman the next morning.
Fortunately the wedding wasn't until 3pm and I was just about intact by then. We got there by the skin of our teeth (taxi driver: "Oh, you meant 1 pm"; waitress at lunch: "Can I re-take your order for the third time?") and I suspect that the traditional sleepy English hamlet pace of life doesn't scale well to an influx of us city folks.
The church was packed for the ceremony, and ceremony there was in spades. Church of Scotland weddings seems to consist of vows, rings and confetti all compressed into about twenty minutes but this one was sufficiently more complicated that I began to wonder which branch of Christianity was being celebrated. On account of the lack of A) Latin, B) glossolia and C) polygamy I eventually decided it must be Church of England, but only just. Perhaps the priest had defected from the Catholic Church - a loose canon, so to speak.
Anyway, the ceremony went like clockwork and I was amazed by how happy and composed Dom and Alice seemed. Seeing them afterwards, and notwithstanding the fact that I'd just witnessed their marriage, I was struck by the feeling that they were genuinely meant to be married to each other. They're going to be a fantastic (married) couple!
The reception was on the village green and was a genial affair. The speeches were great, particularly Alice's Dad's flipchart deconstruction of his daughter as property up for auction (you had to be there). I ate instead of drank myself into a stupor, though not for want of trying the latter, and stumbled to bed about 1 am after what really had been an excellent night**.
On Sunday, miraculously hangover-free, we congregated at Dom's Dad's house for some homemade pizza and cake before the journey back and said goodbye to the newlyweds. We dropped Martin off in Renfrew and drove back along the M8 just in time for me to meet Ash and Scott at the Pear Tree. Six pints of posh European lager turned my brain to mush and I was very, very glad to collapse into bed around 2 am.
I was considerably less glad to arrive twenty minutes late to Monday's 10 am meeting, exuding stale beer through my sweat glands.
P.S. Ruth is back from Oz, and in fine form. It's good to have her back!
* I must plug the Trøll again - it breezes on past 205,000 miles with only a new exhaust and tyres on its account and continues to pretend that it's a bit sporty into the bargain. I had a hole in the still-original exhaust downpipe patched up in the nick of time on Friday morning and the note is back to its throaty best. I mentioned this to the garage owner as a mechanic backed the car off the ramp, and speculated that perhaps it might have an unusual firing order because of its half-a-V8 origins .
"Naw," he said. "Naw, it disnae."
So are myths dispelled and fanciful notions brought to earth.
** Here are some photos of the wedding:
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