Notes from a wedding, 21.09.2013
Sep. 28th, 2013 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI married Shim on the equinox, in Scotland, on a day halfway to autumn. If you don't want to read the rest: my dress was red; our friends cried; afterwards we spent two days in Prague, wrote our names on a padlock and threw the keys into the Vlatava. And nothing and everything has changed. These are notes for my own memory, as much as anything, and also this is where I say thank you for the thousand things – the gifts, and good wishes, the wisdom of the elite group who consulted on my coming-in music! Thank you, which sounds so bare and unadorned, here, compared to the richness of your kindnesses, but thank you. Shim and I appreciate it more than it's possible to say.
We held the wedding, ceremony and reception both, at the Rowantree, which is a pub and open space below the South Bridge in Edinburgh. If you walk down the South Bridge and you don't know the city, you'd be excused for not knowing it's a bridge at all: it looks like an ordinary city street, built above the vaults and spaces of the bridge supports below. The way down into the vaults was rediscovered in the eighties after being forgotten for decades, and once the spaces below had been cleared of a century's middens, they're just magical: today the Rowantree is a smallish festival and wedding venue, dim and warm, filled with fairy lights and stalactites and about a thousand candles. I fell in love with it at first sight about a year ago and the tone of the wedding was set at that point: Scottish, intimate, strange, and full of candlelight. We lit those lights ourselves – metaphorically, but literally (thank you, Ikea) and I would like to be able to show you what that room looked like as I walked in, but I never will; I will never stand anywhere like that again, except in memory.
As y'all know, the week before was anxious. The day before especially – my family and their fifteen closest friends all drove up from Liverpool together and then set up shop in some self-catering flats opposite St Giles' Cathedral, and getting them there was far from unstressful – but once we'd got there it was a beautiful place to be, looking out on the statues of David Hume and somebody-somebody-Bucchleuch (a fine gentleman, I'm sure), and once they were all in Shim and I went on a kind of date, to Blackwell's and the museum café, and he bought me some lemonade and no one cried. And that was… settling, more than anything. The night before, Shim's parents held a getting-to-know-you party, which was also kind of stressful to plan and definitely, now, kind of a blur (although I do remember the joyous experience of being introduced to someone as "the girl… argh… that my brother is marrying!", and on the way back my family tried singing some traditional Hindi wedding songs; my friends responded with a resounding chorus of "I would walk FIVE HUNDRED MILES! And I would walk FIVE HUNDRED MORE!" - when we all went our separate ways one of my uncles turned to me and said, wonderingly, "That is a great bunch of friends you have there.") A little later I went scrambling down Fleshmarket to Waverly and fetchedgavagai and soupytwist off the west coast train. As the night before your own wedding goes, it was perfect – I left my family to make all the noise they wanted downstairs and sat with Laura and Katie on the floor, watching Parks and Recreation and attending to pressing matters. (I said, "Laura, can I borrow your sparkly nail polish?" and she glared and said, "I thought you'd never ask!")
On Saturday morning I woke up surprised I'd slept, surprised for a moment by where I was, then vaguely surprised by I'm getting married today. I got up and brushed my teeth and found some shoes and went to get my hair done and did all those things quite calmly, with the distinct impression they were happening to someone else. Laura kept me company while they were putting the flowers in my hair; she bought me pastries and handled the delivery from the florist and dealt with everything with ease and despite me telling her not to, kept on reminding me of silly things we did when we were freshers and silly things we did as finalists and silly things we did last week. I laughed a lot; I got stabbed by hairpins; in the mirror, I caught the hairdresser looking at us fondly. We went back to the flat and Katie made me two cups of coffee and told me everything was under control. Everything was under control. It was an odd morning; I had all my friends around me,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
teh_elb and proskynesis came up from the hostel they were staying, both radiantly beautiful; Laura tried on her new shoes; I tried, and failed, to eat my pastries; and still, none of it seemed quite real. On the Royal Mile below us there was a nationalist march going on, with huge banners saying "YES TO INDEPENDENCE" and I was quite charmed by the banner that merely read "AAAAAAAAALBA", squished in to fit. ("We're eating cheese and drinking wine," proskynesis said, "they're marching below us. It's basically the French Revolution.") And even when Katie and Laura, with patience and skill, got me laced into my corset dress, I didn't think it was quite real. The dress was red and trailing, with silver sequin detail, and the shoes were all silver glitter. They tied the bow at the back and I wondered if my mind would come into focus with it, but it didn't. Everyone was utterly sweet and hugged me and told me it would all be fine and I think I agreed with part of my mind absent, waiting.
Because of the nationalists, getting a taxi was a problem; my father asked if I wanted him to try and get me one anyway, but it wasn't raining and I said no: how many times in a lifetime will you walk down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, past St Giles' Cathedral, looking all the way down towards the water of the Firth, in a red wedding dress? The stallholders waved at me and shouted congratulations; the tourists took pictures; girls caught my eye and raised invisible glasses. When I came in to see the registrar, she was just finishing up withhathy_col and happydork, who were doing the readings, and they turned around to look at me and inhaled sharply, both of them at once, and then I had it: that tiny flipping-over of something, that clarity. (I had sent Shim a gift via his brother, that morning – a miniature pewter hip flask, to go into his sporran – to go with it I got a half-bottle of Balvenie at the wine merchants' on King's Parade about a month ago. I told them what I wanted the whisky for and the two usually-laconic guys who run the shop both bounced up. "Does he like peaty ones? How about ones from Islay? Do you want to try a few first?" – all ciphers for you're getting married, how wonderful, let us help, like everyone and everything, and I think that's it – everyone helps get you there, but quietly and kindly, so finally, in the vaults with the registrar asking you about your legal mind and your sound mind, you answer and think, foolishly, that you got there on your own.)
I walked down the aisle to a string quartet version of Call Me Maybe. (Those that knew about it beforehand – thank you for the encouragement!) Of course I forgot about it, and had spasms of panic at the sounds of distant laughter when the registrar asked the assembled guests to stand for the bride. And then I walked in and thought, confusedly, that the space seemed smaller than it had the day before when I'd seen it empty, soft and intimate and so, so full of light. On the dais I turned around for a moment and what felt like a thousand people smiled lovingly back.
We had two readings. Colleen did "The Day The Saucers Came", by Neil Gaiman, which she knocked clear out of the park, complete with shambling-zombie impression where appropriate, and I laughed in all the right places and watched the audience laugh in the right places; Katy read "Habitation" by Margaret Attwood, which is much shorter, and listening to her read it, clearly and calmly, I got round again to what we were doing here, on the edge of the receding glacier, here, beginning.
Afterwards I was charmed and touched by how many people assumed without asking that I wrote the vows. I did write them, and Shim neatened them, and they were the same for both of us. I had had a lot of trouble writing them – everything written on the internet on this subject is the most unmitigated crap, and I say that as an incurable romantic. (I am an incurable romantic. I fell in love when I was twenty and have yet to hit the ground. What do you even do.) In the end, I wrote: I will come home to you, I will love you, I will keep the lights burning for you; I will keep safe our space of the world, because everything I ever write comes to this in the end. You can go home again. This is what love is. You can go home again.
Laura and Shim's brother S. witnessed our marriage, and I remember noticing, and smiling, at their home addresses in Nigeria and New Zealand: I picked up the fountain pen and signed it with my body and mind occupying precisely the same space, for once, in Edinburgh, where Shim was born and where my parents lived after their marriage, twenty-nine years ago; we stood up and our friends and family cheered and cried, and the recessional was Recessional. I was told later that I should have taken my engagement ring off, but I didn't do that and in the end I think that, too, was right – my wedding ring merely builds on what came before. (My wedding ring was cast by my mother-in-law out of palladium wire using a blowtorch she was given by her sons last Christmas. I mean. This is how everyone gets you there.)
This is where it begins to get hazy. I know there were canapes and champagne and an impromptu receiving line; there were outside posed photographs and the photographer almost getting himself killed by taking pictures from the middle of the road; there was a brief excursion to the National Museum of Scotland so we could take some pictures without the limitations of, y'know, being in a hole in the ground, and everyone on the way waved and shouted congratulations. In the Rowantree we came in last to dinner and people applauded. I'm pretty sure I made a speech. No, I did make a speech. I have very little recollection of what I said in it, but I remember people laughing and clapping. (I asked the guests to charge their glasses to themselves – to the light they cast, and that felt right in that space full of candles.) My uncle and father also made speeches – loving, ridiculous and thankful speeches – and Shim moved to thank his brother for everything he'd done for help, and S. got up and complained he wasn't the best man – he'd been a witness and a general dogsbody and then the registrar had given him a field promotion to best man – and proceeded to speak beautifully ex tempore as though he'd been practising every night for a month. I was delighted. And just before we went downstairs, an older family friend came to tell me that when she was a girl, it would have been unheard of for the bride to speak at her own wedding – and she was so, so glad that I had.
And there was dancing. There was so much dancing. The first dance was Wild Mountain Thyme, and Shim and I danced lovingly and terribly around the floor to it, and then the band opened the ceilidh with the Lewis Bridal Song, followed it with stripping the willow and an eightsome reel and I had a beautiful time, not just dancing but watching my friends and family learning to whirl. In between dances I hung out withhathy_col and tau_sigma (and admired her hat); such_heights and anotherusedpage and forthwritten found me wine; brightlywoven gave me sage advice on married life. highfantastical had a Polaroid camera! I could not move at all in my dress but didn't let it stop me; Katie pinned it up and I danced in my bare feet (and, later, the water off them ran black, but I didn't mind – it seemed kind of beautiful as well as totally gross, the dirt of that first night's dancing pouring down the drain). At the very end, as is traditional, the band played Auld Lang Syne: Shim and I stood in the centre and spun around arm-in-arm and my dress glowed red and around us our friends and family danced in an enormous loving circle, with their eyes gleaming in the light from the candles. And I thought I might fall over, but was kept aloft by something – willpower, or narrative inevitability – and at the very, very end, we bowed and everyone I have ever loved came rushing into the circle. I would like never to forget that: I hope fifty years from now one of C's Polaroids falls out of a box and I can be transported back to that moment; I hope, even then, that a part of me will never have left it.
Afterwards, we went to a painfully (painfully is Shim's word, I loved it) hip little hotel near the venue (Tigerlily – notable for serving us delicious and immaculately presented breakfasts despite the inexplicably, newly-appeared hole in the roof), and then on to Prague – flying from Edinburgh on a textbook perfect autumn day. Prague! I promptly fell in love with everything about it, the architecture and the winding streets and the warmth and beauty of everything. The hotel room was in a six-hundred-year-old building with the original beams! On two levels with a bathtub you could do lengths in! And just when everything was getting too mediaevally beautiful for words, we discovered round the corner the Museum of Sex Machines!
On our second day, I found the rack of padlocks by the Charles Bridge and thought that it was, not a sign, but something – a reminder from a benevolent universe, perhaps. Shim wrote our two sets of initials on a new padlock and I threw the keys into the river. I don't know how far they fell, but I hope it was a long, long way.
We have come a long way – there is so far to go.
We held the wedding, ceremony and reception both, at the Rowantree, which is a pub and open space below the South Bridge in Edinburgh. If you walk down the South Bridge and you don't know the city, you'd be excused for not knowing it's a bridge at all: it looks like an ordinary city street, built above the vaults and spaces of the bridge supports below. The way down into the vaults was rediscovered in the eighties after being forgotten for decades, and once the spaces below had been cleared of a century's middens, they're just magical: today the Rowantree is a smallish festival and wedding venue, dim and warm, filled with fairy lights and stalactites and about a thousand candles. I fell in love with it at first sight about a year ago and the tone of the wedding was set at that point: Scottish, intimate, strange, and full of candlelight. We lit those lights ourselves – metaphorically, but literally (thank you, Ikea) and I would like to be able to show you what that room looked like as I walked in, but I never will; I will never stand anywhere like that again, except in memory.
As y'all know, the week before was anxious. The day before especially – my family and their fifteen closest friends all drove up from Liverpool together and then set up shop in some self-catering flats opposite St Giles' Cathedral, and getting them there was far from unstressful – but once we'd got there it was a beautiful place to be, looking out on the statues of David Hume and somebody-somebody-Bucchleuch (a fine gentleman, I'm sure), and once they were all in Shim and I went on a kind of date, to Blackwell's and the museum café, and he bought me some lemonade and no one cried. And that was… settling, more than anything. The night before, Shim's parents held a getting-to-know-you party, which was also kind of stressful to plan and definitely, now, kind of a blur (although I do remember the joyous experience of being introduced to someone as "the girl… argh… that my brother is marrying!", and on the way back my family tried singing some traditional Hindi wedding songs; my friends responded with a resounding chorus of "I would walk FIVE HUNDRED MILES! And I would walk FIVE HUNDRED MORE!" - when we all went our separate ways one of my uncles turned to me and said, wonderingly, "That is a great bunch of friends you have there.") A little later I went scrambling down Fleshmarket to Waverly and fetched
gavagai and soupytwist off the west coast train. As the night before your own wedding goes, it was perfect – I left my family to make all the noise they wanted downstairs and sat with Laura and Katie on the floor, watching Parks and Recreation and attending to pressing matters. (I said, "Laura, can I borrow your sparkly nail polish?" and she glared and said, "I thought you'd never ask!")On Saturday morning I woke up surprised I'd slept, surprised for a moment by where I was, then vaguely surprised by I'm getting married today. I got up and brushed my teeth and found some shoes and went to get my hair done and did all those things quite calmly, with the distinct impression they were happening to someone else. Laura kept me company while they were putting the flowers in my hair; she bought me pastries and handled the delivery from the florist and dealt with everything with ease and despite me telling her not to, kept on reminding me of silly things we did when we were freshers and silly things we did as finalists and silly things we did last week. I laughed a lot; I got stabbed by hairpins; in the mirror, I caught the hairdresser looking at us fondly. We went back to the flat and Katie made me two cups of coffee and told me everything was under control. Everything was under control. It was an odd morning; I had all my friends around me,
teh_elb and proskynesis came up from the hostel they were staying, both radiantly beautiful; Laura tried on her new shoes; I tried, and failed, to eat my pastries; and still, none of it seemed quite real. On the Royal Mile below us there was a nationalist march going on, with huge banners saying "YES TO INDEPENDENCE" and I was quite charmed by the banner that merely read "AAAAAAAAALBA", squished in to fit. ("We're eating cheese and drinking wine," proskynesis said, "they're marching below us. It's basically the French Revolution.") And even when Katie and Laura, with patience and skill, got me laced into my corset dress, I didn't think it was quite real. The dress was red and trailing, with silver sequin detail, and the shoes were all silver glitter. They tied the bow at the back and I wondered if my mind would come into focus with it, but it didn't. Everyone was utterly sweet and hugged me and told me it would all be fine and I think I agreed with part of my mind absent, waiting.Because of the nationalists, getting a taxi was a problem; my father asked if I wanted him to try and get me one anyway, but it wasn't raining and I said no: how many times in a lifetime will you walk down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, past St Giles' Cathedral, looking all the way down towards the water of the Firth, in a red wedding dress? The stallholders waved at me and shouted congratulations; the tourists took pictures; girls caught my eye and raised invisible glasses. When I came in to see the registrar, she was just finishing up with
hathy_col and happydork, who were doing the readings, and they turned around to look at me and inhaled sharply, both of them at once, and then I had it: that tiny flipping-over of something, that clarity. (I had sent Shim a gift via his brother, that morning – a miniature pewter hip flask, to go into his sporran – to go with it I got a half-bottle of Balvenie at the wine merchants' on King's Parade about a month ago. I told them what I wanted the whisky for and the two usually-laconic guys who run the shop both bounced up. "Does he like peaty ones? How about ones from Islay? Do you want to try a few first?" – all ciphers for you're getting married, how wonderful, let us help, like everyone and everything, and I think that's it – everyone helps get you there, but quietly and kindly, so finally, in the vaults with the registrar asking you about your legal mind and your sound mind, you answer and think, foolishly, that you got there on your own.)I walked down the aisle to a string quartet version of Call Me Maybe. (Those that knew about it beforehand – thank you for the encouragement!) Of course I forgot about it, and had spasms of panic at the sounds of distant laughter when the registrar asked the assembled guests to stand for the bride. And then I walked in and thought, confusedly, that the space seemed smaller than it had the day before when I'd seen it empty, soft and intimate and so, so full of light. On the dais I turned around for a moment and what felt like a thousand people smiled lovingly back.
We had two readings. Colleen did "The Day The Saucers Came", by Neil Gaiman, which she knocked clear out of the park, complete with shambling-zombie impression where appropriate, and I laughed in all the right places and watched the audience laugh in the right places; Katy read "Habitation" by Margaret Attwood, which is much shorter, and listening to her read it, clearly and calmly, I got round again to what we were doing here, on the edge of the receding glacier, here, beginning.
Afterwards I was charmed and touched by how many people assumed without asking that I wrote the vows. I did write them, and Shim neatened them, and they were the same for both of us. I had had a lot of trouble writing them – everything written on the internet on this subject is the most unmitigated crap, and I say that as an incurable romantic. (I am an incurable romantic. I fell in love when I was twenty and have yet to hit the ground. What do you even do.) In the end, I wrote: I will come home to you, I will love you, I will keep the lights burning for you; I will keep safe our space of the world, because everything I ever write comes to this in the end. You can go home again. This is what love is. You can go home again.
Laura and Shim's brother S. witnessed our marriage, and I remember noticing, and smiling, at their home addresses in Nigeria and New Zealand: I picked up the fountain pen and signed it with my body and mind occupying precisely the same space, for once, in Edinburgh, where Shim was born and where my parents lived after their marriage, twenty-nine years ago; we stood up and our friends and family cheered and cried, and the recessional was Recessional. I was told later that I should have taken my engagement ring off, but I didn't do that and in the end I think that, too, was right – my wedding ring merely builds on what came before. (My wedding ring was cast by my mother-in-law out of palladium wire using a blowtorch she was given by her sons last Christmas. I mean. This is how everyone gets you there.)
This is where it begins to get hazy. I know there were canapes and champagne and an impromptu receiving line; there were outside posed photographs and the photographer almost getting himself killed by taking pictures from the middle of the road; there was a brief excursion to the National Museum of Scotland so we could take some pictures without the limitations of, y'know, being in a hole in the ground, and everyone on the way waved and shouted congratulations. In the Rowantree we came in last to dinner and people applauded. I'm pretty sure I made a speech. No, I did make a speech. I have very little recollection of what I said in it, but I remember people laughing and clapping. (I asked the guests to charge their glasses to themselves – to the light they cast, and that felt right in that space full of candles.) My uncle and father also made speeches – loving, ridiculous and thankful speeches – and Shim moved to thank his brother for everything he'd done for help, and S. got up and complained he wasn't the best man – he'd been a witness and a general dogsbody and then the registrar had given him a field promotion to best man – and proceeded to speak beautifully ex tempore as though he'd been practising every night for a month. I was delighted. And just before we went downstairs, an older family friend came to tell me that when she was a girl, it would have been unheard of for the bride to speak at her own wedding – and she was so, so glad that I had.
And there was dancing. There was so much dancing. The first dance was Wild Mountain Thyme, and Shim and I danced lovingly and terribly around the floor to it, and then the band opened the ceilidh with the Lewis Bridal Song, followed it with stripping the willow and an eightsome reel and I had a beautiful time, not just dancing but watching my friends and family learning to whirl. In between dances I hung out with
hathy_col and tau_sigma (and admired her hat); such_heights and anotherusedpage and forthwritten found me wine; brightlywoven gave me sage advice on married life. highfantastical had a Polaroid camera! I could not move at all in my dress but didn't let it stop me; Katie pinned it up and I danced in my bare feet (and, later, the water off them ran black, but I didn't mind – it seemed kind of beautiful as well as totally gross, the dirt of that first night's dancing pouring down the drain). At the very end, as is traditional, the band played Auld Lang Syne: Shim and I stood in the centre and spun around arm-in-arm and my dress glowed red and around us our friends and family danced in an enormous loving circle, with their eyes gleaming in the light from the candles. And I thought I might fall over, but was kept aloft by something – willpower, or narrative inevitability – and at the very, very end, we bowed and everyone I have ever loved came rushing into the circle. I would like never to forget that: I hope fifty years from now one of C's Polaroids falls out of a box and I can be transported back to that moment; I hope, even then, that a part of me will never have left it. Afterwards, we went to a painfully (painfully is Shim's word, I loved it) hip little hotel near the venue (Tigerlily – notable for serving us delicious and immaculately presented breakfasts despite the inexplicably, newly-appeared hole in the roof), and then on to Prague – flying from Edinburgh on a textbook perfect autumn day. Prague! I promptly fell in love with everything about it, the architecture and the winding streets and the warmth and beauty of everything. The hotel room was in a six-hundred-year-old building with the original beams! On two levels with a bathtub you could do lengths in! And just when everything was getting too mediaevally beautiful for words, we discovered round the corner the Museum of Sex Machines!
On our second day, I found the rack of padlocks by the Charles Bridge and thought that it was, not a sign, but something – a reminder from a benevolent universe, perhaps. Shim wrote our two sets of initials on a new padlock and I threw the keys into the river. I don't know how far they fell, but I hope it was a long, long way.
We have come a long way – there is so far to go.