Sunday, August 08, 2004
Still listening
Two years ago my oldest friend and his girlfriend of (then) four years got engaged. Some six months later his mum died very suddenly and unexpectedly at Christmas time, only a few months after she and my friend’s dad had moved back to the place where they had grown up in order to retire. Which made the wedding I attended on Friday as my oldest friend’s best man even more affecting than weddings normally are. Various other factors, which I shan’t go into for personal reasons, coupled with a beautiful day, an extraordinary location near London, and a great deal of alcohol (as you would expect – the groom, having just landed a plum new job just outside London the previous week, insisted on starting the day with us making Bucks Fizz with two £90 bottles of Dom Perignon) combined to make a day, two days even, that I wont quickly forget, and certainly the best wedding of the half-a-dozen or so that I’ve been to so far in my life. The speeches all went well, causing tears and laughter as appropriate, the suits were immaculate, the food excellent, the (civil) service brief and touching, the company wonderful (even if, for the first dance, I was left alone drinking Pimms, my partner being several hundred miles away). I’m welling up now just recalling it all. The fact that my friend of twenty years is moving away in three weeks, and that this will almost certainly mean we only see each other a couple of times a year at most for the foreseeable future, merely compounds the emotion by mixing it with sadness. The six-hour drive back to Devon the following day (busy M25 and A303) was somewhat maudlin and subdued…
NJS
8/08/2004 08:08:00 pm
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