Categories: uncategorized
Date: 06 December 2007 00:02:56
At this point, the story sort of splits in two, as my life split into two directions at once while running parallel, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn't, the two parallel bits will be logged as separate entries.
We kept the engagement secret for a week. At the very least, we weren't going public until parents had been told.
The weekend after St Sims, we went to Cambridge to tell Tina's parents the happy news. We then hot-footed it back to London to tell my mother. That evening, I'd gathered as many of my friends as possible in the local pub for a "special" announcement. Nobody seemed surprised, but lots of people bought me drinks anyway.
We had to sort out a date, and settled on May the following year. We then had to decide where to marry. It was either to be at my church in London, or at Tina's church in Cambridge. We also had to decide who would marry us. That was fairly easy: If we married in London, the Fr C, my vicar, would marry us and G, Tina's vicar would be invited to preach the sermon. If at Cambridge, then it would be the other way around. We had decided to have a Communion service and had invited my old mate Geoff to preside at the communion.
I'd also invited my friends from the London Cantata Choir to sing at the service, and for our friend S to play the organ. We decided on London as the venue as both of us have family scattered around the country, so London is more central.
We had to search for a reception venue too. Our original thought was to hire a church hall and get some caterers in. However, after doing some sums, it seemed that having a hotel didn't work out much more expensive and would have the advantage of having somebody else to do the clearing up at the end.
It's said that weddings cause more family arguments than anything else. That wasn't our experience at all. Both sets of parents were very supportive throughout. The closest we got to an argument was regarding the reception venue. Tina's parents had found somewhere they liked the look of, but I wasn't so sure. Evenb so, the argument didn't account to much and culminated with me being told "Well, you look for somewhere then", which I did.
During the autumn, we attended the wedding of a couple of Tina's very long standing friends. It was then it suddenly dawned on me that the next wedding I was to attend would be my own.
On the 4th Sunday of Advent, Fr C announced that he was leaving to take up a new post in East Anglia. We initially hoped that he'd be able to come back for the wedding, but it transpired that his induction in the new place was only a few days before, so it wouldn't be possible for him to come back on his first weekend in a new parish. G agreed to marry us and to preach.
2002 became 2003. A friend at church warned me that now the New Year had arrived, the wedding would creep up very suddenly without us noticing. He was right!
I February, Tina's grandmother died. This wasn't entirely unexpected, but we were all obviously saddened by it. She had been really looking forward to the wedding and we'd all hoped she'd be able to make it, despite her ill health.
At some point, we ordered the wedding rings. Now that was scary. Well, a mixture of scary and exciting. Trying them on in the shop suddenly made the whole thing real.
Plans went ahead. We put together the order of service between us, chose the readings, the hymns and the prayers. Sorted out bridesmaids, Best Man, ushers etc. Everything was going brilliantly.
While all this was going on, I was also trying to break in to a new career.