Pre Nuptials

There follows a full account of our wedding, which might seem to some of you a little self-indulgent (read: boring), but I feel the need to get stuff down in black and white as it's already starting to fade from the memory, and some people have been clamouring for a blow-by-blow summary, so here goes.

Events started for me on the Friday evening when I was ejected from my flat and sent to a hotel. Partly to stop me from seeing the bride before the wedding (it's nice to maintain some of these old customs) but mainly to give Jane and her chief bridesmaid room to do their bridal preparation thang. Which turned out to be a very good idea as the bridesmaid's partner ended up requiring shelter for the night too, and four of us in my little house with 2 large dresses and other related paraphernalia would have been a bit of a squeeze.

I feels strange booking into a hotel in your home town. Weeks ago, while we were putting together a sheet of information for guests, I realised that I didn't even really know what hotels there were in King's Lynn, let alone whether they were any good. The "main" town centre hotel in Lynn is "The Duke's Head", and that was the one we recommended to most people as it was near to the register office. It was also the place where I'd be staying the night.

The hotel's grand Georgian frontage on King's Lynn's market square masks a much uglier and shabby-looking 1960s extension at the rear, which is why I was a little worried that I'd stuck myself (and a few of my friends) in a complete dump. But it turned out to be okay, if a little quiet and under-staffed. I guess there aren't many business guests on a Friday night, and late October isn't exactly high season for King's Lynn tourism.

So there I was, sitting in a hotel room on my own in Lynn, and for the first time in what seemed like forever I had absolutely nothing to do. Anything that wasn't organised now would never get organised, so it was pointless worrying. The balls were all set in motion. I was naught but a Newtonian body, set in a collision course with my destiny...

Basically, yeah, I was bored.

Luckily help was at hand. I undid my suitcase and grasped a small black and square box emblazoned with a large shiny "X". The postman had surprisingly delivered it a whole day early that afternoon, and by happy chance I'd been home to sign for it. I unpacked the golden disk within and on my last night on Earth as a free man... set about installing OSX Leopard on my Mac laptop.

Certain people have pointed out that this is a bit sad.

In my defence, it was a great way to keep my mind off things without resorting to drink. And Leopard is great OS, it really is. I must blog about it sometime.

I left the install chugging away and went to explore the hotel a little and check that the reception (who for some reason had registered my booking under the name "Mr Harringdine", a surname so far removed from my actual one that I'm happy to repeat it here without fear of compromising my privacy) had managed to correctly understand a more important matter, namely that I would be checking out early the next day but not leaving the hotel, as we'd booked into the honeymoon suite for the next night.

On the way down I ran into...

Well, this is where it gets a little awkward. There were a smattering of my friends of the transsomething persuasion at my wedding, but they were (with one special exception) all in Stealth Mode. And even Sophie, who I'd never have wanted to come as anything but Sophie, was working her usual SEP field magic and going under most peoples' radars.

The bloke I ran into eating dinner with his wife is also a tranny, but it feels a bit wrong to use the feminine pronouns I'd use without thinking when reporting back about a tranny do, because this definitely wasn't one of those occasions. But equally it feels strange to talk about all of these people using their male names who you might know better as their tranny personas. So forgive me if I get a bit vague with names, they know who they are.

On the way down I ran into a tranny who's been a friend since my very first time out dressed and his partner. He told me he'd been called by Graham, who was having car trouble somewhere on the A1 and probably wouldn't be making it down the night before as expected.

Which worried me, but I pushed it to the back of my mind and worried about things that I could influence... namely ensuring that Mr and Mrs Harringdine could check in to the Honeymoon suite when they returned from the register office the next day.

Which is where I bumped into the Derby/Liverpool posse, looking remarkably fresh faced from their trip cross-country. It was really great to see them.

Which was a very good excuse to retire to a nearby pub and introduce them to the local hospitality. At some point Graham phoned again to say the car was a goner and he'd be staying the night in Worksop. Due to some terrible luck, his wedding guest expenses were turning out to be quite a lot more than anyone expected.

I didn't get at all drunk, I think maybe Bacchus had kindly decided to channel my alcohol content into Danny, who seemed to get inexplicably plastered on only a couple of pints of the local ale.

Which meant I was totally clear-headed for the next day. I got up and dressed, and then I got married.

Oh wait, there was more to it than that...