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Oct. 20th, 2003 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanHere we are again, happy as can be....
Or not, as the case may be.
It's been a busy weekend, full of ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, or, to put the point in another and altogether more accurate way, the wedding of one of my longest-serving friends.
Saturday, therefore, involved arising at an utterly scandalous hour in order to catch a 10AM train from St Pancras. From there to Kettering and straight onto Loddington, the village where the wedding was to take place. Sitting in the tiny and ancient village church it occurred to one of our other friends from our undergraduate days 12 years ago that we appeared to have wandered onto the set of the Vicar of Dibley. (The vicar was indeed female but that wasn't the main reason for it).
A fairly short and traditional CofE wedding ceremony, rather unusually so these days. I've been to more weddings than I care to recall by now, but so far as I remember none of them were traditional in this sense, the majority being Catholic and most of the rest being non-Christian. So I'm less familiar with the service than one would expect... I found it surprisingly moving.
After that and a blissfully short photo session, the four people I knew well (mutual friends from the university days and their spouses) and I wandered around for a while trying to find people with spare seats in their cars to take us on to Kelmarsh Hall, a couple of villages further on, where the reception was to take place. Fortunately two elderly couples managed to fit us all in and off we trundled, detained only briefly by a couple of errors in map-reading and the discovery that according to the map there are in fact two places called Loddington in Northamptonshire.
Kelmarsh isn't exactly beautiful, but it is an interesting building. The grounds, however, are perfect: as S., the groom, said to me while we were having a cigarette on the lawn, it felt somewhat as though we'd wandered into a Gainsborough.
Champagne flowed freely for an hour or two, then onto dinner, probably the best food I've ever had at a wedding. I have no idea what the white wine was like, because the red was fabulous and didn't stop coming. Speeches weren't too bad, though the best man's speech was about two and a half minutes too long. From the point of view of someone who had a time two and half minutes less in the sweepstake that is. More drinking, mostly for free, dancing, more food (I think it was what they call a "light supper") and so on into the night.
I know lots of S.'s friends and family, and wandered around being unusually sociable. I was vaguely amused to realise that The GrownUps (as they will always be to me, even when I've turned 50 should I reach that far) were all fairly pleasant upper middle class county types; while everyone in my generation appeared to either (a) work in media; (b) be a lawyer or (c) both (M., S.'s wife, is a media lawyer turned TV type, while S. himself remains a city lawyer).
In the end, there were only two bad things about the evening. The first was that half of the people there, including, remarkably, me, ran out of cigarettes in a place which we were reliably informed was more than three miles from the nearest cigarette machine or shop. The second was that having summoned up the courage to ask a friend of M.'s for her phone number, which I quite devoutly intended to make use of, I managed to lose it at some point. Sometimes I surprise even myself by just how fuckwitted I can be.
Eventually, the five of us took a taxi back to Kettering and our respective hotels (I managed to obtain a fairly cheap room by forgetting to book until the evening before). The most memorable thing about the hotel, which I think was generally ok, was the graffiti in the lavatories written in Tolkienian runes and tengwar, underneath which another hand had written "Fucking Immigrants!" Whether the author was ignorant or being funny we shall never know, but I was blackly amused.
Much to my surprise, I woke up with only a mild buzz in my head, rather than the stonking hangover that mixing champagne, a glass or so of white, several glasses of red, and a fair amount of whisky ought to bring. I was filled then with a certain spirit of adventure and decided that rather than headingstraight back to London I would go and find some NT or EH site in Northamptonshire to explore. Lord knows the place isn't short of them, it's also a county with some wonderful landscape. As one of the Grown Ups had said to me the day before, Northamptonshire is still much like Oxfordshire was 40 years ago, and I could understand what he meant.
So, leaving the others to make their way back to London I went to see where I might visit. The results, sadly, were unimpressive: Northamptonshire's bus services are somewhat limited on a Sunday. But I could reach Desborough, and from there it was, I was informed by an EH flyer, a mere three miles to one of Sir Thomas Tresham's remarkable follies: the Triangular Lodge.
So off I trundled on the bus, and then on my feet. The walk wasn't too bad, though I think it would have been better for my best shoes had I packed my boots, which I'd jettisoned from my luggage for the sake of saving weight.
The Folly is a fascinating place, an architectural meditation on the Trinity. Tresham was a noted recusant, and his son was not quite a Gunpowder Plotter, but was invited to join the Plot and forbore to inform the authorities (he said that he considered it more likely to destroy the Catholic faith in England for good than anything else). It stands in the middle of nowhere, with an aged security guard to take your 2 quid and little more.... one man's bizarre contribution in stone to theological and political debate, looking out over the hills.
And then, after a repeat of my three mile walk and bus journey, thinking deep thoughts as I went, I made my way back to London and discovered that the Northern Line had fallen apart, just south of my station. Why do I live here again?
I wandered down to London Bridge and A.'s flat, studiously avoiding David "Fuckwit" Blaine, to see bits of the Clique, including C, who vanished without trace from our radar a couple of years ago until re-emerging the other week, but frankly I was too tired for much and hadn't done enough work on this morning's hearing, so I buggered off back home, not an easy task when London's key tube-line is missing.
I'm glad I'm still in touch with those people I saw at the wedding, and a couple of others, from more than 12 years ago. It seems to bring some kind of continuity to my life. I wonder if what Katy said a while ago is true, and that friends are far more important -and, to be honest, easier to keep in the era of mass communication- than they were for our parents, or whether, like my parents, we'll gradually lose almost all of our old friends as time goes on. I trust not.
On the other hand, it does slightly worry me that there are increasingly few of my friends who aren't married, or in a long-term relationship. Bah, humbug. Ah well, on the other hand, many of them also have children, with which they are, undeniably, very happy, but for myself I'm not quite ready for that kind of loss of freedom just yet...
Someone outside in New Square is playing the Skye Boat Song on bagpipes. Time to go home I think.
Or not, as the case may be.
It's been a busy weekend, full of ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, or, to put the point in another and altogether more accurate way, the wedding of one of my longest-serving friends.
Saturday, therefore, involved arising at an utterly scandalous hour in order to catch a 10AM train from St Pancras. From there to Kettering and straight onto Loddington, the village where the wedding was to take place. Sitting in the tiny and ancient village church it occurred to one of our other friends from our undergraduate days 12 years ago that we appeared to have wandered onto the set of the Vicar of Dibley. (The vicar was indeed female but that wasn't the main reason for it).
A fairly short and traditional CofE wedding ceremony, rather unusually so these days. I've been to more weddings than I care to recall by now, but so far as I remember none of them were traditional in this sense, the majority being Catholic and most of the rest being non-Christian. So I'm less familiar with the service than one would expect... I found it surprisingly moving.
After that and a blissfully short photo session, the four people I knew well (mutual friends from the university days and their spouses) and I wandered around for a while trying to find people with spare seats in their cars to take us on to Kelmarsh Hall, a couple of villages further on, where the reception was to take place. Fortunately two elderly couples managed to fit us all in and off we trundled, detained only briefly by a couple of errors in map-reading and the discovery that according to the map there are in fact two places called Loddington in Northamptonshire.
Kelmarsh isn't exactly beautiful, but it is an interesting building. The grounds, however, are perfect: as S., the groom, said to me while we were having a cigarette on the lawn, it felt somewhat as though we'd wandered into a Gainsborough.
Champagne flowed freely for an hour or two, then onto dinner, probably the best food I've ever had at a wedding. I have no idea what the white wine was like, because the red was fabulous and didn't stop coming. Speeches weren't too bad, though the best man's speech was about two and a half minutes too long. From the point of view of someone who had a time two and half minutes less in the sweepstake that is. More drinking, mostly for free, dancing, more food (I think it was what they call a "light supper") and so on into the night.
I know lots of S.'s friends and family, and wandered around being unusually sociable. I was vaguely amused to realise that The GrownUps (as they will always be to me, even when I've turned 50 should I reach that far) were all fairly pleasant upper middle class county types; while everyone in my generation appeared to either (a) work in media; (b) be a lawyer or (c) both (M., S.'s wife, is a media lawyer turned TV type, while S. himself remains a city lawyer).
In the end, there were only two bad things about the evening. The first was that half of the people there, including, remarkably, me, ran out of cigarettes in a place which we were reliably informed was more than three miles from the nearest cigarette machine or shop. The second was that having summoned up the courage to ask a friend of M.'s for her phone number, which I quite devoutly intended to make use of, I managed to lose it at some point. Sometimes I surprise even myself by just how fuckwitted I can be.
Eventually, the five of us took a taxi back to Kettering and our respective hotels (I managed to obtain a fairly cheap room by forgetting to book until the evening before). The most memorable thing about the hotel, which I think was generally ok, was the graffiti in the lavatories written in Tolkienian runes and tengwar, underneath which another hand had written "Fucking Immigrants!" Whether the author was ignorant or being funny we shall never know, but I was blackly amused.
Much to my surprise, I woke up with only a mild buzz in my head, rather than the stonking hangover that mixing champagne, a glass or so of white, several glasses of red, and a fair amount of whisky ought to bring. I was filled then with a certain spirit of adventure and decided that rather than headingstraight back to London I would go and find some NT or EH site in Northamptonshire to explore. Lord knows the place isn't short of them, it's also a county with some wonderful landscape. As one of the Grown Ups had said to me the day before, Northamptonshire is still much like Oxfordshire was 40 years ago, and I could understand what he meant.
So, leaving the others to make their way back to London I went to see where I might visit. The results, sadly, were unimpressive: Northamptonshire's bus services are somewhat limited on a Sunday. But I could reach Desborough, and from there it was, I was informed by an EH flyer, a mere three miles to one of Sir Thomas Tresham's remarkable follies: the Triangular Lodge.
So off I trundled on the bus, and then on my feet. The walk wasn't too bad, though I think it would have been better for my best shoes had I packed my boots, which I'd jettisoned from my luggage for the sake of saving weight.
The Folly is a fascinating place, an architectural meditation on the Trinity. Tresham was a noted recusant, and his son was not quite a Gunpowder Plotter, but was invited to join the Plot and forbore to inform the authorities (he said that he considered it more likely to destroy the Catholic faith in England for good than anything else). It stands in the middle of nowhere, with an aged security guard to take your 2 quid and little more.... one man's bizarre contribution in stone to theological and political debate, looking out over the hills.
And then, after a repeat of my three mile walk and bus journey, thinking deep thoughts as I went, I made my way back to London and discovered that the Northern Line had fallen apart, just south of my station. Why do I live here again?
I wandered down to London Bridge and A.'s flat, studiously avoiding David "Fuckwit" Blaine, to see bits of the Clique, including C, who vanished without trace from our radar a couple of years ago until re-emerging the other week, but frankly I was too tired for much and hadn't done enough work on this morning's hearing, so I buggered off back home, not an easy task when London's key tube-line is missing.
I'm glad I'm still in touch with those people I saw at the wedding, and a couple of others, from more than 12 years ago. It seems to bring some kind of continuity to my life. I wonder if what Katy said a while ago is true, and that friends are far more important -and, to be honest, easier to keep in the era of mass communication- than they were for our parents, or whether, like my parents, we'll gradually lose almost all of our old friends as time goes on. I trust not.
On the other hand, it does slightly worry me that there are increasingly few of my friends who aren't married, or in a long-term relationship. Bah, humbug. Ah well, on the other hand, many of them also have children, with which they are, undeniably, very happy, but for myself I'm not quite ready for that kind of loss of freedom just yet...
Someone outside in New Square is playing the Skye Boat Song on bagpipes. Time to go home I think.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-21 03:02 am (UTC)You clot. Is this a number you'll be able to get off M., one hopes?
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Date: 2003-10-21 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-21 03:37 am (UTC)Have you checked *all* the pockets of your suit? Including the breast pocket?
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Date: 2003-10-21 06:10 am (UTC)Do they have mobile phones in Utah? I did actually leave a message on S voicemail on Sunday but he didn't ring back...
Lots of people who knew Ro at the wedding incidentally, on both sides (he did history with S and me, and M. did her training contract at what was then Theodore Goddard so lots of people from there, and meeja law is a small world anyway). He wasn't there though.