Maria and PJ's wedding
Mar. 29th, 2012 09:38 pmLet me tell y'all about weddings #2 and #3! They came on the heels of an ill-starred few days - on Friday I had a bit of an accident on Hills Road and flew off the bike. I was fine, it was all fine, but it was a little alarming; and then on the way to wedding #3 from wedding #2 I blithely dinged my car. Well, I didn't - thank goodness, my car was fine and so was the one I hit (!) - but also, alarming. But then the clouds cleared away, fig. and very much lit., and then all was sunshine.
(About that, yes. Wedding #2 was in a registry office in St Albans. A distant family wedding - the bride is my second cousin - but I am quite fond of her and her now-husband, and St Albans is on the way from Cambridge to Oxford. It was a sweet, simple wedding, it was nice to see my family however briefly (Shim, my father and I stood very awkwardly in the garden while the pictures were taken - it was a bonding experience) and also I caught the bouquet! I wasn't trying to - it just sort of fell from the sky onto my head. So we left cheerfully, with a lovely collection of roses, and went on to Oxford.)
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brightlywoven and exactlyhalf put us up, as they have done with all kindness several times now, so the four of us went for dinner at Red Star (oh, how I miss the Cowley Road) and then drank a lot of pink wine and laughed a lot. In the morning, we went down the High Street to Oxford Town Hall in suit and kilt and dresses ("We're cool like Reservoir Dogs," exactlyhalf noted) in the midst of the sort of glorious spring day that gets under your skin. I lived in Oxford five years, I remember saying, and have visited so much in between times, and yet it's still possible to fall in love with the cherry blossom outside All Souls as though seeing it for the first time. It's the loveliest city in the world.
Oxford Town Hall is surprisingly nice inside. It has lots of pretty stonework and glass, and the artwork is interesting if sometimes not on-mood (the wedding ceremony took place beneath the head of John the Baptist in glorious Technicolor) and it really was a lovely place for a wedding. We all gathered together, there was a harpist, there were adorable tiny children in tiny waistcoats, there were many old friends.
Then the bride and groom came in, both escorted (and I think this was such a nice way to do it) by both their parents, and then me, I was done.brightlywoven had kindly and shrewdly provided me with tissues beforehand. She and I and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thecapitalc and pretty much everyone present sniffled their way through the next twenty minutes. Maria looked so, so beautiful, in a sleek and glorious dress her mother had made, and even she was choking a little when she said her vows. Everything was perfect and simple and done with immaculate class. Afterwards we threw confetti on them in the gorgeous sunlight and the grandparents were helped into cycle rickshaws, while the rest of us wandered down the High Street. More cherry blossom; more beauty.
The reception was at St Edmund Hall. Oddly I don't think I knew anyone who actually went to Teddy Hall, so I'd never been inside before, and it's really very nice: a small quad colourful with flowers. They had photographs in the graveyard of the college, which sounds morbid but was actually gothically romantic; none of the graves is less than a couple of hundred years old and it's amazing how sun-warmed stone can glow with people's happiness and discarded champagne glasses. The medic contingent made medic conversation, and I laughed a lot over dinner. (I love them so; after seven or eight years of knowing them I still have not learned that they will talk about catheters over dessert.)
The speeches were a delight (and live simultaneously-translated into Russian, which I found very impressive). All except the bestman woman's speech, which was in verse. With citations. She sat down and knocked back a glass of red wine to riotous applause. And then there was Maria's father's speech, which stuck in my mind, because of what he said about "Oxford, where we learn among a community of distinguished scholars, and dear friends". Yes.
We had to be back, no excuses, on Sunday night, and preferably early. Accordingly, around half past five, Shim and I began trying to leave. But there was cake cutting and Ethiopian coffee; there was music; there was the first long day of British Summer Time; there were so many of the people I love. I think we left Teddy Hall and crossed Magdalen Bridge around seven, and made it back to Cambridge gone ten, with no regrets. It's such a cliché, but it is such a joy and a privilege to have grown into adulthood and myself in an old and handsome city with old and dear friends.
Wedding #4 is in two weeks in New Zealand. I am steadfastly unprepared thus far.
(About that, yes. Wedding #2 was in a registry office in St Albans. A distant family wedding - the bride is my second cousin - but I am quite fond of her and her now-husband, and St Albans is on the way from Cambridge to Oxford. It was a sweet, simple wedding, it was nice to see my family however briefly (Shim, my father and I stood very awkwardly in the garden while the pictures were taken - it was a bonding experience) and also I caught the bouquet! I wasn't trying to - it just sort of fell from the sky onto my head. So we left cheerfully, with a lovely collection of roses, and went on to Oxford.)
brightlywoven and exactlyhalf put us up, as they have done with all kindness several times now, so the four of us went for dinner at Red Star (oh, how I miss the Cowley Road) and then drank a lot of pink wine and laughed a lot. In the morning, we went down the High Street to Oxford Town Hall in suit and kilt and dresses ("We're cool like Reservoir Dogs," exactlyhalf noted) in the midst of the sort of glorious spring day that gets under your skin. I lived in Oxford five years, I remember saying, and have visited so much in between times, and yet it's still possible to fall in love with the cherry blossom outside All Souls as though seeing it for the first time. It's the loveliest city in the world. Oxford Town Hall is surprisingly nice inside. It has lots of pretty stonework and glass, and the artwork is interesting if sometimes not on-mood (the wedding ceremony took place beneath the head of John the Baptist in glorious Technicolor) and it really was a lovely place for a wedding. We all gathered together, there was a harpist, there were adorable tiny children in tiny waistcoats, there were many old friends.
Then the bride and groom came in, both escorted (and I think this was such a nice way to do it) by both their parents, and then me, I was done.
brightlywoven had kindly and shrewdly provided me with tissues beforehand. She and I and thecapitalc and pretty much everyone present sniffled their way through the next twenty minutes. Maria looked so, so beautiful, in a sleek and glorious dress her mother had made, and even she was choking a little when she said her vows. Everything was perfect and simple and done with immaculate class. Afterwards we threw confetti on them in the gorgeous sunlight and the grandparents were helped into cycle rickshaws, while the rest of us wandered down the High Street. More cherry blossom; more beauty.The reception was at St Edmund Hall. Oddly I don't think I knew anyone who actually went to Teddy Hall, so I'd never been inside before, and it's really very nice: a small quad colourful with flowers. They had photographs in the graveyard of the college, which sounds morbid but was actually gothically romantic; none of the graves is less than a couple of hundred years old and it's amazing how sun-warmed stone can glow with people's happiness and discarded champagne glasses. The medic contingent made medic conversation, and I laughed a lot over dinner. (I love them so; after seven or eight years of knowing them I still have not learned that they will talk about catheters over dessert.)
The speeches were a delight (and live simultaneously-translated into Russian, which I found very impressive). All except the best
We had to be back, no excuses, on Sunday night, and preferably early. Accordingly, around half past five, Shim and I began trying to leave. But there was cake cutting and Ethiopian coffee; there was music; there was the first long day of British Summer Time; there were so many of the people I love. I think we left Teddy Hall and crossed Magdalen Bridge around seven, and made it back to Cambridge gone ten, with no regrets. It's such a cliché, but it is such a joy and a privilege to have grown into adulthood and myself in an old and handsome city with old and dear friends.
Wedding #4 is in two weeks in New Zealand. I am steadfastly unprepared thus far.
