Wednesday 27 July 2011

Weddings 2 and 3

Easthampstead Park

Saturday 16^th dawned sodden for Gail and Rob’s wedding and it proceeded to pour for most of the morning. Drove to the station to collect Ruth’s godmother, a retired architect living in Chichester, and proceeded in pouring rain to St Catherine’s Church, Bearwood, where the rain briefly left off and Mrs Millard cunningly collared the photographer to take a few photos of us outside the church. Service was OK as church weddings go (a big qualifier there), though the ushers should have sat people better: there weren’t enough guests to fill the space in the church and the first three rows, for some reason marked ‘Reserved’, ended up having only Mrs Millard and one bridesmaid sitting in them. Ruth read I Corinthians 13, though she was spitting feathers at having to read the English Standard Version rather than the King James and hence not getting to say ‘sounding brass’.

The reception was held at Easthampstead Park, a Victorian mansion near Wokingham that’s now used as a conference centre – it isn’t a hotel but does provide accommodation for weddings and other functions. I was pleased to see Mrs Millard’s quartet of lovely bell-ringing friends from our Christmas lunch in Norfolk, and also met Ruth’s godfather Nick, an ebullient long-haired character who was apparently briefly tour manager for the Sisters of Mercy, and his pleasant-seeming partner. Was surprised to see Ruth enthusiastically taking to the dance floor in the evening but she may have had a bit¹ to drink. There’s some video footage, but I’m too kind to publish it anywhere.

Me and Ali

Ray came up after work on Thursday after what had apparently been a knackering day’s concreting, and we tried out the restaurant at The Plough – quite nice. He departed up the river on Saturday with Maurice, a friend from the marina, who is relocating to a marina up in Derbyshire – the planned route was up the Thames to Oxford and then north on the Oxford Canal; don’t know where after that. Ray was intending to go with him as far as they got in four days or so, then get the train back to Reading.

Continuing the unusual, for me, frenzy of wedding-related activity, Ali, Claire and I drove down to Frome on the morning of Saturday 23^rd to attend an evening wedding reception. Sarah, the youngest member of our Book Group, had married her boyfriend Tim earlier that day at a church near her parents’ home and the address of the evening reception was charmingly given as ‘Grandad’s Field’. After a bit of last-minute panicking, Ali had booked us into the George Hotel right in the centre of Frome, a slightly shabby old hotel but a good location. Had a lovely lunch at the Black Swan Arts centre and a wander around Frome which is a pretty old town and makes much of apparently having been “the Bath before Bath was discovered”, or some such. In the evening we took a taxi out to Grandad's Field and met up with Helen and Lesley, who had been at the wedding, though apparently they had got lost en route and only just made it. There was barn dancing, though only Claire indulged out of our group. Lesley was righteously indignant at having walked onto the floor with a woman earlier only to have the compere immediately shout "right, we need two more men". Barn dancing's obviously a strictly hetero affair.

Ali evidently shares Ray's approach to driving somewhere new, which I admire though could never emulate; it consists roughly of not consulting a map beforehand but setting off in the approximate direction of your destination and relying on seeing the place you're trying to reach pop up on a road sign at some point. Assuming you're not in a big hurry, it is actually quite relaxing, though I'm not nearly laid-back enough to do it myself.

Got back to Reading around midday on Sunday and was forced to admire the flower that has appeared on the vile cardoon (henceforth TVC). Here's a picture of it.

¹ A lot.